The spring in Cloonown, County Roscommon, carries none of that. It is named for Saint Bridget on Ordnance Survey maps going back to 1837, the name rendered in the deliberate gothic lettering that cartographers traditionally reserved for antiquities and places of sacred or historic note. And yet there is no record of veneration here, no local knowledge of any devotional practice, no physical evidence that anyone ever visited this spot for reasons other than the purely practical.

The well itself is a natural rectangular spring, roughly five metres east to west and two metres north to south, rimmed by field stones and largely overgrown, though open to the south-west. Both the 1837 and 1915 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map show it and name it identically, which suggests the designation was not a cartographic slip but a settled local usage at least by the early nineteenth century. How the name of Ireland's most beloved female saint came to attach itself to this particular spring on a flat stretch of Roscommon farmland, without any accompanying tradition of prayer or pilgrimage, is simply not known. Today the site is used by cattle. The gap between the name it carries and the life it has lived is the most interesting thing about it.