The well there was labelled in Gothic script, the typeface the surveyors reserved for antiquities and ancient features rather than for ordinary, workaday things. Whatever the well was to the people who used it daily, the cartographers evidently regarded it as something older and worth distinguishing.

Yet the well does not appear to have carried any sacred status. The Kilkenny historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905 in his substantial account of the diocese, noted simply that it was "a good well" and took care to point out that Maddockstown had no holy well among its features. Holy wells, which are found throughout Ireland and are typically associated with a patron saint, patterns, and ritual visits, were a distinct category in Carrigan's reckoning, and this was not one of them. It was, by his account, a domestic well, used for the practical business of drawing water. The Gothic script on the OS map sits a little awkwardly with that plainness, suggesting either that the surveyors knew something Carrigan did not, or that the well's age alone was enough to earn it the antiquarian designation, regardless of any religious or legendary associations.