That is more or less what happened at Millfarm in County Limerick, where St John's Well, once a site of pilgrimage and folk cure, was absorbed into the local Hospital waterworks and lost to active religious practice. The well still appeared on the 1927 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, but by the time the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair was gathering his notes, the devotions had already ceased for more than fifty years.

Ó Danachair, writing in 1955, recorded a place that had recently crossed the threshold from living tradition to memory. Before that crossing, the well followed the pattern familiar to many Irish holy wells: rounds were made, meaning a prescribed circuit of prayers walked in a set direction, and a bush beside the water served as a votive station where visitors hung rags, small strips of cloth left as tokens of petition or thanks. Both the bush and the practice are now gone. The water was believed to cure eye ailments, and the legends gathered around the well carry that theme with some force. One tells that a trout appeared in the water to those who had been cured there, the fish functioning as a kind of confirmation or sign. Another warns of the well's capacity to move when it was profaned, a motif found at other Irish sites that expresses the idea of sacred water as a living presence rather than a fixed feature. The sharpest story involves an unbeliever who brought a blind horse to the well, perhaps in mockery; the horse recovered its sight, and the man lost his own. The inversion is neat and unambiguous.

The site today is not accessible in any straightforward sense, having been incorporated into the Hospital waterworks infrastructure. There is no bush, no votive cloth, no visible well as such. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in what the documentary record preserves, a snapshot of a tradition in its final years, taken just precisely enough by Ó Danachair to leave the legends legible. For anyone researching holy well traditions in Munster, or the intersection of folk belief with landscape change, the Millfarm entry in his 1955 survey is the substance of the visit.