Not collapsed, not capped, not repurposed, but simply gone, leaving no surface trace whatsoever in the low-lying pastureland of Castletown in County Galway. It exists now only as a coordinate, a recorded absence, a place that was once significant enough to name and return to, swallowed by the slow work of land reclamation.

The well sat near a stream, close to the boundary of its townland, in ground that had at some point been drained and converted to pasture. Reclaimed land of this kind was common across the west of Ireland as agricultural improvement schemes, particularly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onward, reshaped boggy and waterlogged terrain into workable fields. The process was often thorough enough to erase older features entirely, and that appears to be what happened here. Holy wells, which were focal points of local devotion and pattern days throughout rural Ireland, were frequently located near water sources and at liminal spots such as parish or townland boundaries, which makes the positioning of this one entirely typical. What is atypical is that nothing at all remains to mark it.