That distinction matters. Holy wells are among the oldest continuously used sacred sites in Ireland, places where pre-Christian veneration of water sources quietly merged with Catholic practice, and where the calendar of the Church mapped itself onto older rhythms of seasonal gathering. The fact that this one is called Lady's Well points clearly to its Marian association, the "Lady" in question being the Virgin, and the August date locking it into one of the most significant feasts in the Catholic year.

The earliest surviving description comes from the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839, a remarkable set of documents compiled as part of the great nineteenth-century mapping project, in which local correspondents recorded place names, antiquities, and customs across the country. The entry for Ballyda notes that the well was "much venerated still" at that time and attracted "great numbers of devotees" on the fifteenth of August. The word "still" is doing quiet but significant work there; it implies a continuity already understood to be old in 1839. The well appears again in O'Kelly's account from 1969, which records that it remained in use for devotional purposes on the same date, more than a century after the Ordnance Survey observation. Two sources, separated by roughly 130 years, telling the same story about the same August gathering at the same well is a form of evidence that rewards attention.