Tobar Patraig, a spring on the eastern bank of a small river valley in the Borrismore townland of County Kilkenny, is notable precisely for the absence of all that. When Ordnance Survey officers passed through in 1839 and recorded what the local people called it, Patrick's Well, they also noted without ceremony that it had "no character for sanctity, nor is it held in more veneration than other springs." For a site bearing the name of Ireland's patron saint, that is a quietly remarkable distinction.

The 1839 Ordnance Survey Letters, edited by Michael O'Flanagan and published in 1930, place the well about a furlong, roughly 200 metres, to the west of a place called Art an Fhiona in the same townland. The historian William Carrigan also noted it in his 1905 work on the diocese of Ossory, though without adding much to the picture. What the surveyors described as a large spring has since become a silted-up pond, sitting in gently rolling ground given over to tillage and pasture. The name alone survives with any clarity, a placeholder for a saint whose connection to this particular spot, if there ever was one, has left no trace in local memory or practice.