A well that no longer exists, named after a priest from a neighbouring county, and recorded only once on a single edition of a map before quietly disappearing from the record: the well at Bawnfune in County Waterford is an absence that raises more questions than most surviving sites answer. What makes it quietly curious is the combination of factors surrounding it. It was never regarded as a holy well, which sets it apart from the many water sources in rural Ireland that attracted devotional or folkloric significance. Yet someone thought it worth naming, and the name stuck long enough to be noted.

The well was known locally as Fr. Sheehy's Well, called after a Catholic priest who served as parish priest of Clogheen in County Tipperary during the Penal era. The Penal Laws, in force broadly from the late seventeenth century into the nineteenth, imposed severe legal restrictions on Catholic worship and clergy in Ireland, making priests who continued to minister to their communities figures of considerable local importance and loyalty. That a water source just across the county boundary in Waterford should carry the name of a Tipperary parish priest speaks to how communities remembered such figures, attaching their names to ordinary features of the landscape long after the historical circumstances had faded. The well itself sat on a south-facing slope on the western bank of a small stream running roughly north to south. It appeared on the 1927 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which suggests it was a recognised local landmark at that point, even if it carried no religious function in the formal sense. It does not survive today.