It is the kind of place that accumulates quiet contradictions: marked on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1841 to 1842, and again on the 1914 edition, yet labelled each time as a site rather than a living feature, as though its sacred function had already slipped out of living memory by the time the surveyors arrived.

The map name, Toberscattery, is something of a misreading. The Ordnance Survey Name Books suggest the correct form is Tobar Eiltín, meaning the well of Eiltín. Tobar is the Irish word for a well, and in Kerry the landscape is scattered with such sites, many of them associated with early Christian figures and visited for pattern days or rounds, a traditional practice of circumambulating a holy site while reciting prayers. Whether Eiltín was a local saint, a lesser-known devotional figure, or simply a name attached to the place over centuries, the notes do not say. What they do record is that the current landowner had no knowledge of it ever being used as a holy well, which places its period of veneration, if it had one, well outside the span of local oral memory.

There is something faintly melancholy in the cartographic persistence of a site designation across seven decades of mapping, as though the surveyors suspected something was there even when the community had stopped marking it with prayer or offering. The flagstones remain. The cattle drink.