A well that translates as 'Salmon Well' yet, according to researcher Jackson, never actually had a tradition of a salmon living in it, is the kind of quiet contradiction that local place-names sometimes preserve without explanation. The name survives; the logic behind it, if there ever was one, does not. What the well does carry, more plausibly, is a connection to organised religious life: local tradition holds that the water was drawn upon by the monks of the friary at Castledermot, the medieval Franciscan settlement a short distance away in County Kildare.

Jackson's account, published in the Journal of the Kildare Archaeological Society in 1979 to 1980, is the main record of what was known about the site. The field in which the well once sat has since been drained, and there are now no visible surface traces of it remaining. The well has, in effect, been absorbed back into the landscape, leaving only the name of the townland, Abbeyland, and that slightly puzzling salmon reference to suggest that something was once here.