That is not a figure of speech. When the site was inspected for record, the well could not be located at all, leaving it in an odd category: a place that exists in documentation but has effectively vanished from the ground.

The well was dedicated to St. Forannan, also rendered in the sources as Marannán or Farannán, and the Irish form given by Patrick Power in 1907 is Tobar Naoimh Mharanáin. Holy wells, typically springs or pools associated with an early Christian saint and often the focus of a patron feast day known as a pattern, were once central to local religious life across Ireland. This one was noted as lying close to St. Brigid's Church and roughly two hundred yards to its south, between the church and the river. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840, compiled by John O'Flanagan, record the dedication and note that Farannán was the patron saint of Domhnach Mór Muighe Femhen, a place-name pointing to one of the early ecclesiastical foundations of the Suir valley plain. The letters also record that even by 1840, the patron day associated with the well had already been forgotten, suggesting the site had been falling out of active use for some time before the landscape around it was drained and converted to pasture.