No stone, no inscription, no trickle of water. Whatever once marked this as the original site of St Crannat's well has been entirely erased, enclosed within garden walls and absorbed into private grounds. And yet the absence is itself the point: according to local tradition, the well did not simply fall into disuse. It left.

The story goes that the lady of the house, a property known as The Glen, grew tired of pilgrims arriving to venerate the well and had a walled garden built around it to discourage them. In response, the well relocated of its own accord to a new site roughly 900 metres to the north-north-west. A second explanation, recorded by O'Reilly in 1987, is more specific in its cause. As was customary, the woman of the house invited a travelling man to turn the handle of her butter churn, but then refused him the small offering that convention required. He knew that she used water from the well to wash her butter, so he filled his cap with that water and carried it away, dropping it at the foot of a rock about a mile to the south-east, near Monanimy Castle. That spot became St Nicholas' well, and the original well at Killuragh was left dry and forgotten. The two legends are different in their mechanics but share the same moral logic: a well associated with a saint will not remain where it is not respected, and the consequences of inhospitality, or of obstructing devotion, are measured in the loss of something that cannot be recovered by building walls around it.