Holy wells dedicated to Saint Patrick are scattered across Ireland, many still drawing visitors for the saint's feast day or for the old practice of "pattern" days, when people would walk circuits around a well and pray for cures or favour. This one, though, has been quietly shut away for quite some time.

When the Ordnance Survey Letters were compiled between 1838 and 1840, a remarkable grassroots effort to document local history, placenames, and antiquities across Ireland, the well at Kiltimon was already a thing of the past rather than the present. The record, later published by O'Flanagan in 1928, noted that it was "a well now closed up, but formerly much frequented under the name of Tubber Patrick or Patrick's Well," and placed it specifically in Mr. Gorman's yard. The Irish "Tubber" or "Tobar" simply means well, and the pairing with Patrick's name suggests it once held the kind of local devotional significance common to such sites throughout the country. By the time the surveyors arrived, that life had already drained away.

What remains is a slab-covered well at the centre of a farmyard, its former reputation preserved only in a nineteenth-century document and the placename that lingers around it. The contrast between its current setting and its past as a place of popular religious gathering is the quietly strange thing about it.