It carries on doing what it was believed to do long after the formal occasion around it has dissolved. That is roughly what happened at this holy well near Castlemarket in County Kilkenny, where the healing reputation outlasted the public ritual.

When the Ordnance Survey officers were collecting local information in 1839, they recorded that the well had been the site of a Pattern, or patron, held on the fifteenth of August and again on the eighth of September. A Pattern was an annual gathering at a holy well or sacred site, typically on the feast day of the saint or Marian figure associated with it; these events combined religious devotion with socialising and could draw large crowds. Both dates here are significant in the Catholic calendar, the fifteenth of August being the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin and the eighth of September her birth, which strongly suggests a Marian dedication, consistent with the name Lady's Well. By the time the survey was conducted, the Pattern had already lapsed, having been discontinued around 1819. The well itself, situated roughly a quarter of a mile north-east of the local church, was still being visited for the cure of sore eyes and similar ailments, a use that attached itself to many such wells across Ireland regardless of whether organised gatherings continued around them.