The spring at Toberbrackan in Doorus, on the south shore of Kinvara Bay in County Galway, carries a rather more alarming reputation. Local tradition holds that its water was used as a cure for cholera, a disease that swept through Ireland in devastating waves during the nineteenth century. That a small rural well should have been turned to in the face of something so catastrophic says something about the depth of trust placed in these sites, however slim the odds.

The well itself sits within an oval hollow roughly fifteen metres north to south and thirteen metres east to west, occupying the hollow's north-eastern quadrant. A rectangular drystone surround, a low enclosure of unmortared stacked stone of the kind commonly used to mark and protect sacred or significant water sources, frames the spring, measuring about 3.3 metres by 2.7 metres. Mature beech trees grow around it, lending the spot a degree of shade and enclosure that sets it apart from the surrounding landscape. The cholera reference was recorded by Korff and O'Connell in 1985, which places it within the tradition of late twentieth-century fieldwork that sought to document surviving local knowledge about such sites before it was lost entirely.