Lords Well, Loughnaneane, Co. Roscommon

Most of the country's thousands of named wells are associated with saints, cures, or patterns, those communal gatherings once held on a patron saint's feast day. Lords Well is simply a well, its name rendered in gothic lettering on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1837 and 1927, acknowledged and documented, but apparently untouched by devotion.

The folklorist and scholar John O'Donovan, who travelled County Roscommon in the 1830s gathering place-name evidence for the first Ordnance Survey, recorded the well explicitly as one that was not holy, a note that stands out given how readily wells of any age or origin attracted religious association in rural Ireland. The well itself is a substantial, rectangular structure, measuring roughly three metres north to south and two point seven metres east to west internally, with a grass-covered stone spread forming its sides. The water within it reaches a depth of around one and a half metres. What is particularly curious about its location is that Lady's Well, a site with the kind of Marian or saintly resonance entirely absent from Lords Well, sits just ninety metres to the north-north-east. The two wells, one secular and one presumably devotional, occupy the same quiet patch of landscape, close enough to feel deliberate, yet apparently distinct in character and in use.