They are not equal in status. Tradition held that the larger, higher well was the holy one, its water drunk by passers-by who might also stop to pray; the smaller well's water was reserved for bathing sore eyes. A stone head, said to represent St. Catherine, was fixed above the arch of the larger well, and as late as the early twentieth century it was described as having a wooden door and a canopy. By 1958, the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair noted that the stone head had already been stolen more than once. It has since been removed entirely, and the well hood vandalised. The wells are no longer venerated.

The site has a documented history reaching back to 1219, when, according to folklore collected at Lucan schools in 1937, the Canons of the Congregation of St. Victor, a medieval religious order, took possession of it. The land was given by a man named Warrisius de Peche, who also built the Church of the Blessed Mary of Lucan and left the site in the community's charge. Sir Adam de Hereford, recorded as Lord of Leixlip, later assigned the canons lands in Leixlip on the condition that they pray for the souls of his ancestors. A more atmospheric strand of local tradition, also collected in 1937, held that the wells arose from the ground where St. Catherine's blood fell after she was taken from a nearby convent and killed; ruins of both a convent and a chapel were said to stand within a furlong or two of the wells. One further folk story, from the Lucan Presentation Convent collection, describes a man who piped the holy water to his house against the advice of the local priest, only to find he could never heat it, no matter how much fuel he burned.

The wells are accessible from the side entrance to St. Catherine's Park, and the arched stone structures are still visible, though in poor condition. The carved head that once distinguished the larger well is gone, and there is no longer any devotional activity at the site. Visitors familiar with Irish holy wells, where offerings of rags or small objects are commonly left, will notice the absence of these here; the Schools' Collection accounts from Palmerstown are themselves uncertain on this point, one student noting they were unsure whether offerings were ever left at all. What remains is a pair of quiet, somewhat neglected stoneworks that, taken together with the layered folklore surrounding them, speak to a very long local habit of regarding this particular patch of ground as something out of the ordinary.