The well at An Tearmann in County Mayo carries almost none of that. When it was inspected in 1995, no evidence could be found to suggest any great antiquity, and no tradition of use as a holy well had survived, if one ever existed at all.

What the historical map record does offer is a small puzzle. The well does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, the foundational survey that documented Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail during the post-Union decades. Yet by the 1921 edition of the same series, it had acquired a name: Tober-na-Fairge, a Irish-language designation meaning something close to "well of the sea" or "well of the ocean." How a well gains a name in the intervening eighty-odd years without accumulating any corresponding tradition of significance is not easy to explain. It may simply reflect local usage that was never accompanied by ritual, or a name applied by surveyors drawing on spoken local knowledge that has since faded entirely from memory.