Despite being recorded by name, it slipped past the Ordnance Survey cartographers who produced both the first-edition six-inch map in 1839 and the more detailed twenty-five-inch revision of 1899, leaving no mark on the landscape record beyond a brief mention in a local history.

The well's name, given in Irish as Tobar na Maighdine, meaning the Virgin's Well, appears in William Carrigan's 1905 history of the diocese of Ossory, where he places it in Caherlesk, describing it as lying nearly opposite Whitechurch. Holy wells dedicated to the Virgin are found across Ireland, often associated with patterns, the traditional gatherings of prayer and communal observance held on a saint's feast day, though no such customs are recorded here. What the nineteenth-century OS maps do show is a small stream apparently rising from a point roughly a hundred metres south-east of Whitechurch, flowing north-east for around a hundred and eighty-eight metres before joining a larger river. That spring, tucked within a narrow strip of forestry plantation, is the most plausible candidate for the well's location, the source having perhaps always been modest enough to escape the surveyors' attention or simply unremarkable enough in appearance to go unmarked.