What makes this particular site quietly puzzling is the duplication: a second well bearing the same dedication, St Werburgh's Well, lies to the southwest, raising the question of why the same obscure saint came to be associated with two separate water sources within the same general vicinity.

The well appears by name on Duncan's map of 1821, labelled as St Werburgh's Well, which places it firmly within the tradition of early modern cartographic recording of sacred sites that might otherwise have gone undocumented. St Werburgh herself was a seventh-century Mercian abbess, daughter of King Wulfhere of Mercia, whose cult had a surprisingly strong foothold in Dublin, most visibly through the Church of St Werburgh in the old city. Holy wells, which were freshwater springs accorded religious significance and often associated with healing or with the feast days of particular saints, were extremely common across Ireland; many were maintained as sites of local devotion long after the institutional church had moved on. Whether the Commons East well shared any active devotional life with its southwestern counterpart, or whether the two represent some confusion in the cartographic or oral record, is not clear from the surviving evidence.

For anyone hoping to visit, there is very little to see. The well has been built over and no visible remains survive above ground. The value of knowing it existed lies less in making a trip than in reading the landscape with a slightly adjusted eye: beneath ordinary suburban or agricultural ground in County Dublin, the faint outlines of an earlier sacred geography are occasionally still legible, if only through the evidence of old maps and the patient work of compilers like Geraldine Stout and Christine Baker, who recorded the site for the national archaeological inventory.