Somewhere in the Waterford countryside, towards the head of a quiet valley running north-west to south-east, there sits a pond with a name that demands explanation. It is called Tobar na bhFiacal, the Teeth Well, a designation striking enough to appear on both the 1840 and 1927 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, yet no one seems to know quite why. No folklore has been recorded, no patron saint invoked, no pattern day observed. The name simply persists, passed down through place-name into cartography and onward, stripped of whatever story once gave it meaning.

Holy wells in Ireland were typically sites of devotion and local ritual, often associated with cures for specific ailments, and a well named for teeth might reasonably be expected to carry traditions of toothache remedies or saintly intercession. Here, there are none. The well itself is a modest open pond, roughly four metres north to south and two to three metres east to west, and it may function as the origin point of the stream that runs down through the valley below. Whether the name reflects a lost curative tradition, a landscape feature, or something else entirely is now impossible to say with any certainty.