Nothing about it obviously signals devotion any more, yet local memory insists it was once the focus of the kind of folk piety that leaves rags and holy objects tied to branches and tucked into stonework. The gap between what is physically there now and what was once practised there gives the place a particular quality, a sense of something half-remembered and only partly legible.

The well does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which suggests it had not yet acquired enough formal recognition to be recorded, or that its significance was purely local and oral at that point. By 1905 and again in 1937 it was named and mapped, placing it in a period when antiquarian and cartographic interest in such sites was growing. The local antiquarian James Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, noted that the well was reputed to cure sore eyes and scurvy. That combination is worth pausing over: the attribution of healing powers to specific ailments, especially ones visible on the body like sore eyes or the skin lesions associated with scurvy, is characteristic of Irish holy wells, which were often associated with very particular complaints rather than general wellbeing. The curative reputation did not survive in active use, but the physical markers, the cup, the statues, the remembered rags, suggest it remained a place of at least residual significance well into living memory.