At Cruach Na Cara in County Galway, there is a holy well that, by the time anyone came looking for it in earnest, was simply no longer there. When a survey was carried out in August 1984, the well could not be located at all, roughly sixty-five metres north of the local church. The working theory is modest and a little melancholy: it was probably a small natural spring that had dried up at some point before anyone thought to record it properly.

What survives is the memory of what the well once meant. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of a sweeping effort to document Ireland's place names and antiquities, record that the well was dedicated to Saint Mac Dara and was much venerated by people of the neighbouring shores. Mac Dara is a saint closely associated with this stretch of the Connemara coast and the islands nearby, particularly Oileán Mhic Dara, where the ruins of a remarkable early stone oratory still stand. The veneration recorded here fits a wider pattern of coastal communities maintaining devotional sites connected to a saint whose feast day, the sixteenth of July, once drew boats from across the bay, their sails dipped three times in the saint's honour as they passed his island. That the well at Cruach Na Cara fed into this same current of local faith makes its disappearance feel like more than just a geological footnote. References in Hardiman's work from 1846 and in Tim Robinson's careful mapping of the region confirm the well's place in the landscape, even if the landscape itself eventually reclaimed it.