This one, in the townland of Gortnagross in County Limerick, may no longer exist at all, which makes it a curious kind of absence rather than a place to visit. It is a site recorded in scholarship and rooted in living memory, yet when researchers went looking for it, they found nothing: no spring, no stone surround, no local recollection that anything of the kind had ever been there.

The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair documented the well in 1955, naming it Tobar Mhichíl, a name that places it within the widespread Irish tradition of wells dedicated to the archangel Michael. At the time of his writing, the well was apparently still serving a practical purpose, supplying water to the nearby village of Athea. Ó Danachair also recorded testimony from an old man, born in 1816, who reported that his own grandfather had made rounds at the well. Making rounds, or "turas" in Irish, refers to a devotional practice of walking a set circuit around a sacred site, often reciting prayers at specific stopping points, and it was commonly performed at holy wells across Ireland. Working backwards from that account, the practice of visiting the well could plausibly stretch to the mid-eighteenth century or earlier. When Denis Power compiled the site record in August 2012, however, neither the Ordnance Survey maps nor an extensive search of the area turned up any trace of a well at the location Ó Danachair had indicated. No local knowledge of it survived either.

For anyone visiting the Athea area with an interest in this record, the honest position is that there is likely nothing to see. Gortnagross is a rural townland in west Limerick, not far from the Kerry border, and the landscape is quiet agricultural country. The well's disappearance is not unusual in itself; springs can be culverted, capped, or simply forgotten as water sources become obsolete. What is unusual here is the completeness of the erasure: a well documented as recently as the 1950s, associated with living oral tradition reaching back generations, leaving no physical or local trace whatsoever. That gap between the written record and the ground underfoot is, in its own way, the thing worth noting.