That quiet paradox is what makes Tober Jarlath, in County Galway, an unusually honest kind of sacred site. Holy wells, traditionally springs or water sources associated with a local saint and visited for blessing or healing, were once scattered across Ireland in their thousands. Many have simply vanished from the landscape over the centuries, absorbed by drainage works or overgrown beyond recognition. This one at least left a record of its disappearance.

The well is dedicated to Saint Jarlath, the sixth-century founder of the monastic school at Tuam, and it sits within the north-west quadrant of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary that often marks the limits of an early Irish monastic or church site. The scholar John O'Donovan noted the well in 1839, and it appeared on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which gives it a reasonably firm presence in the historical record. By the time the third edition of that map was published in 1930, however, the cartographers had added the telling prefix "Site of", a small but significant editorial admission that the well itself was gone. No visible surface trace survives today. In 1943, a stone memorial was erected to mark where it had been, which is itself a kind of archaeology: the commemoration of an absence.