This well in Ballinruane, County Wexford, carries none of that. There is no record of a pattern ever having been held here, no surviving evidence of veneration, and yet the name has persisted across centuries and the place continues to draw the occasional visitor.

The well appears by name, written in gothic lettering, on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, and again on the 1925 edition, which suggests the association with Saint Martin was already well established by the time the first surveyors reached this corner of Wexford. The structure itself is a rectangular, stone-lined well with a low concrete wall added to its top, measuring roughly 1.7 metres by 1.55 metres and reaching a depth of around 1.2 metres. It sits on a gentle west-facing slope, with a north-south stream running about 70 metres to the west and a road passing some 20 metres to the north. The setting is modest, even ordinary, which makes the persistence of the saint's name all the more quietly puzzling. Holy wells dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours, the fourth-century bishop whose feast day falls on 11 November, are found occasionally across Ireland, sometimes connected to traditions around the slaughter of animals on that day, though no such tradition has been recorded here.

The well is partly overgrown with furze, the dense, spiny shrub common to Irish rough ground, but it remains accessible and is still visited. Those who do find it will encounter a plain, functional thing, named for a saint, stripped of the ritual life that might once have surrounded it, or perhaps never possessed it at all.