That detail, recorded by the antiquarian Grove White in the early twentieth century, does something no architectural description quite can: it places you in the presence of something genuinely old and genuinely strange. The holy well at Mullaghroe in north Cork sits just outside the north-east corner of a burial ground, covered now by a low concrete structure with a gate opening to the east, a modest hood fitted in 1904 by the Rural District Council at the request of one Daniel O'Connor, described in the record as a poet and mason. The trout, if it was ever really there, is long gone.

The well is dedicated to St Latiaran, a figure identified locally as a sister of Iníon Buí and Lasair, a trio of female saints whose cult spread across parts of Cork and whose kinship ties, real or legendary, were recorded by Ó Ríordáin in 1986. The devotional life around the well is layered and precise. Rounds, the traditional circuit of prayer made around a sacred site, begin at a nearby Saint's Stone and take place on 25th July, following mass in the adjacent burial ground. Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, observed that the well was attended mostly by women, who came seeking cures for all kinds of diseases. Bowman, writing in 1934, noted that rounds were also performed on Good Friday, and that a pattern, the festive gathering that in Irish tradition accompanied pilgrimage to a holy site, was held on the Sunday before the 25th of July.

The well's situation, in rough grazing beside a working burial ground, keeps it from feeling like a monument. It remains embedded in the landscape of ordinary life, which is perhaps exactly how its history has been preserved.