There is nothing left to see here, and that absence is itself part of the story. On the south bank of a wide stream near An Móta in County Waterford, a holy well once drew crowds on the feast day of Saint Nicholas. The well has gone, the wall around it was swept away by flood, and the pattern, the traditional gathering of prayer and communal ritual held annually at such sites, was abolished around 1830. What remains is a place on a map and a handful of nineteenth-century references that together sketch the outline of something now entirely lost.

The well appeared on both the 1840 and 1926 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, marked at a point roughly seventy metres west of where a west-to-east stream meets a larger north-to-south watercourse. The protective wall surrounding it was destroyed in a torrent in 1841, a detail recorded by the antiquarian John O'Donovan during the Ordnance Survey's fieldwork in Waterford that year. The pattern associated with the well was held each year on the 6th of December, the feast day of Saint Nicholas, but it had already been suppressed around a decade before O'Donovan visited. The suppression of such patterns was common in early nineteenth-century Ireland, often driven by Church authorities concerned about the rowdier social elements that tended to accompany these gatherings. Despite the pattern's end, the Reverend Patrick Power noted in 1898 that the well continued to be venerated locally, suggesting that informal devotion persisted long after the formal occasion had been discontinued.

No physical evidence of the well survives today. Its location, identified only by its relationship to two converging streams, is the kind of place that passes without any outward sign of its former significance.