Tober Ronan, a holy well whose name appears in gothic lettering on Ordnance Survey maps from as far back as 1835 and again on the 1945 edition, has effectively vanished from the ground. No water rises, no stone surround marks the spot. What persists instead is a tree, and in a crook of one of its branches, a small reservoir of collected rainwater that local people still treat as sacred.

Holy wells in Ireland have long been sites of pattern devotion, where offerings are left and cures sought, often on the feast day of the saint associated with the well. Tober Ronan takes its name from Saint Ronan, and the cure it was historically credited with was specific: warts. That particularity is itself a feature of the tradition, where individual wells carried individual remedies rather than general healing powers. The Irish Folklore Commission's Schools Collections record this cure in two separate volumes, suggesting it was well known in the area rather than an isolated belief. What makes the Tullybradan site unusual now is the displacement of the sacred from a fixed, mapped point to something more provisional. The rags tied to the nearby tree follow a practice found at holy wells across Ireland, where strips of cloth, sometimes called clooties, are left as votive offerings, often after the water has been used in a cure. Here, that practice has migrated to the tree itself, which has quietly absorbed the role the well once held.