The well, known in Irish as Tobar Briocáin, was destroyed in 1982, leaving no visible remains on the north bank of the Aille River where it once sat. Holy wells are a particular category of sacred site woven into the Irish landscape for centuries, typically associated with an early Christian saint and used for patterns, the traditional ritual visits combining prayer with communal gathering. This one had survived long enough to appear by name on both the 1842 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which makes its loss in living memory feel especially abrupt.

When the well was recorded before its destruction, it was described as lined with flagstones, with low sod built up at the back, a modest but deliberate construction typical of tended holy wells across the west of Ireland. Its dedication to Saint Brecan connects it to a figure associated with the Aran Islands, where a substantial early medieval monastic site also bears his name. The well sat in a flat east-west valley of pasture along the Aille River, with steep hillsides rising to the north and south and higher ground behind to the east. Roughly forty-five metres to the west-northwest stands Toomullin church, a medieval structure that suggests this quiet corner of County Clare once held considerably more religious significance than its present emptiness implies. The well and the church together would have formed a small but meaningful sacred landscape, the kind that guided local devotion for generations before the land was given over entirely to grazing.