This spring in the wet valley floor near the Nuenna river in County Kilkenny is something of an inversion: a well named after the country's patron saint that nobody, apparently, ever bothered to venerate.

When Ordnance Survey investigators recorded the area in 1839, local people were already calling the spring Tubber Patrick, or Patrick's Well, but the surveyors noted pointedly that they held it "in no veneration for sanctity." The more interesting observation was that the well had probably once carried a quite different name altogether. The investigators believed it was originally Briotan's Well, the spring from which the parish of Tubbrid itself takes its name. That older name, they remarked, was "a very un-Irish one," and over time it had simply been forgotten and replaced with the far more familiar Patrician label. It is a small, telling example of how place-names drift: a locally specific and somewhat anomalous designation quietly displaced by a more recognisable one. The ruined church at Tubbrid stands about 160 metres to the east, and it is plausible that the well's proximity to that site is part of what encouraged the Patrician association, even without any accompanying tradition of pilgrimage or ritual.

The site today consists of three small springs emerging at roughly the same point on the flat, marshy ground beside the river, though some of those outlets may owe as much to drainage works over the years as to any natural source. There is no pattern of offerings, no stonework marking the spot, and no record of the kind of communal observance that distinguishes the more celebrated holy wells of the region. It sits quietly, unnamed in any practical sense, doing what springs do.