This one in Bellayarha, County Galway, lost even that long ago. What marks the spot today is a scattering of limestone blocks and rubble, half-buried in overgrowth, sitting in a low-lying field that floods with some regularity. It is the kind of place that asks you to take a great deal on faith.

The well was already gone by 1839, when Ordnance Survey officers working on their Letters, a series of detailed topographical notes compiled to accompany the first large-scale mapping of Ireland, recorded it simply as dried up. Yet the site did not entirely disappear from local memory. Schoolchildren collecting folklore in the 1930s, as part of a nationwide project that gathered oral traditions from communities across the country, recorded that the location was still identifiable as a round hollow, roughly three metres across and a metre deep. More tellingly, they also noted that a tradition persisted locally that cures had been effected there. The well had been dry for generations at that point, and no one was performing patterns or making rounds in any formal sense, but the idea that the place had once held healing power had not quite let go.

Holy wells dedicated to Saint Patrick are common across Ireland, and many follow a familiar pattern, a natural spring, a stone surround, perhaps a rag tree hung with offerings. This one seems never to have been elaborate, and the waterlogged ground it occupies may always have made it an uncertain proposition. What remains is less a monument than an absence, a slight depression in a soggy field, with the limestone rubble offering the only physical suggestion that something was here and once mattered to people.