None of that is especially unusual. What is unusual is the name the place carries, and what that name may or may not mean.

Ordnance Survey maps from both 1840 and 1916 mark this as Brian Boru's Well, invoking the celebrated High King of Ireland who died at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1905, recorded the local name differently: 'Boru-well', which he understood to mean nothing more heroic than 'red cow'. Holy wells, a category of sacred spring sites found across Ireland that were traditionally associated with patron saints or healing properties, were often given names that accumulated layers of meaning over centuries, with later generations sometimes grafting a famous figure onto an older, more prosaic toponym. Whether that is what happened here is impossible to say with certainty, but the gap between the cartographic grandeur of 'Brian Boru' and the vernacular plainness of 'red cow' is quietly telling. The site was formally listed as a holy well in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, which at least confirms its recognised place in the broader landscape of such sites. The well itself rises from a ledge of outcropping rock and spills into a pond roughly ten metres across, a modest but self-contained piece of hydrology that has been drawing names and associations to itself for a very long time.