It is easy to miss, and for a long time it had a lid that would have told you exactly what it was. That lid is gone now, broken at some point in the past, and the well sits without its inscription, known only to those who already know it.

Locally the site is called Tobar Cholmcille, the well of Saint Colmcille, the sixth-century monk and scholar associated with Iona and with a remarkable spread of sacred sites across the west of Ireland. Holy wells dedicated to him tend to be places of quiet, persistent veneration, visited on pattern days and credited with curative or protective properties. This one was modest even by those standards: a natural hollow in the rock, the kind that collects and holds water on its own, given meaning by dedication and by the carved lid that once covered it. That lid bore the saint's name, according to local memory, until it was destroyed. The account collected by cartographer and writer Tim Robinson attributes the damage, with a certain resigned sweep, to 'the sappers, the soupers, the Tans or some other lot like them', a phrase that compresses a long history of outside interference into something almost too tired to be angry. Sappers were military engineers, often associated with Ordnance Survey work in Ireland during the nineteenth century; soupers referred to those who offered food or material incentives during the Famine in exchange for religious conversion; the Tans were the auxiliary forces active during the War of Independence in the early 1920s. The local memory does not pin the blame precisely, and perhaps that is the point.