In his version, John Macmillan, the first shepherd the Bankes family had at Letterewe, had a sheepdog that went mad. About 1830 he took it to Isle Maree and put it headfirst into the well. The dog died the next day, and John Macmillan died a week after that.
The story sits inside a wider belief that the island's well and trees were not to be treated carelessly. It is a single local account, told by an old man more than fifty years after the event.
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