The well known as Tobar Garán, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1927 by O'Flanagan, sits on the southern bank of a small stream in Cloonnaglasha, County Galway, roughly twenty metres south of a cashel, or stone-built ringfort enclosure, on the opposite bank. Holy wells are a persistent feature of the Irish landscape, often pre-Christian in origin and later absorbed into Catholic practice, their waters associated with healing, blessing, or the veneration of a local saint. This one has lost almost every physical trace of itself.

Local memory preserves what the ground no longer shows. The well was originally surrounded by stone kerbing, a modest but deliberate framing that marked it as a place apart from the ordinary stream margin. Women from the area would visit on the eve of every holy day of obligation, those feast days in the Catholic calendar on which attendance at Mass is required. The pattern of visitation, regular, calendrically structured, and apparently the preserve of women, places the well within a broader tradition of popular devotion that ran alongside, and sometimes at a tangent to, formal church observance. At some point the kerbing was removed or collapsed, and the well silted or dried, leaving only the faint depression that can still be found there.