The one known locally as Scáithín, in Westquarter, County Galway, draws almost nothing at all, because by the time anyone went looking for it in June 2016, there was no visible trace of it left. The spring, which sits in a smooth-sided recess in a rock outcrop along a track to the west of a small house cluster, had dried up and been stopped with turf. Vegetation may have done the rest. What remains, in essence, is the memory of a place.

The name Scáithín is thought to derive from a saint's name, which is the typical origin for wells of this kind across the west of Ireland. Holy wells were, and in many places still are, sites of localised veneration, often associated with a particular saint credited with healing or protective power, and frequently marked by annual patterns, the traditional gatherings that combined prayer with communal celebration. This well sits roughly 150 metres southwest of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, a spatial relationship that is far from accidental; sacred sites in early medieval Ireland tended to cluster, the well serving the enclosure, or the enclosure lending authority to the well. That enclosure survives nearby, even if the spring that once accompanied it does not.