The one found at Clonmoney in County Clare is something rather different: a carefully designed ornamental well from the nineteenth century, complete with a flight of steps, a flagstone platform, and a formal rockery along its northern edge. It is the kind of thing you might expect to find in a walled garden rather than in the ground beneath a national road.

The well came to light in 2000 during excavation work carried out ahead of improvements to the N18-N19 Ballycasey-Dromoland route. Situated on a gentle north-facing slope, the structure was evidently built with some deliberate elegance. An irregular flight of steps led down a sloping ramp to the flagstone platform, which gave easy and presumably graceful access to the water below. That water arrived not by chance seepage but through a duct, suggesting a degree of engineering effort beyond the purely functional. A rockery, formally constructed, ran along the northern flank of the whole arrangement. The well is most likely connected to Clonmoney House nearby, and would have served as one of those carefully composed garden features that prosperous households of the period used to ornament their grounds, turning a practical water source into something worth walking to.