The one at Lisheenteige offers none of that. Set in low-lying ground beside a stream in County Galway, it presents itself as a dry, unenclosed circular hollow roughly three metres across, its basin partly filled with loose stones. There is no water, no obvious embellishment, and no enclosure to distinguish it from the surrounding landscape. What makes it quietly worth attention is not what remains of the well itself, but what stands immediately beside it.

A small limestone cross, less than seventy centimetres tall and just over sixty centimetres wide, rises from the ground to the north-north-west of the hollow. On its north-north-western face, an inscription records that it was erected by a man named Patrick Kelly in 1780. That detail roots the cross firmly in the late eighteenth century, a period when popular devotion to holy wells across Ireland was neither suppressed nor particularly celebrated by the institutional church, but simply continued in a vernacular, local way. The cross is modest in scale, the kind of marker that a single individual might commission or cut rather than a community project, which gives it a certain personal quality. Whether Kelly had a specific reason to mark this spot, a cure sought, a vow fulfilled, or simply a desire to preserve a place he considered significant, the inscription does not say.