Nobody locally seems to recall the place ever being venerated. And yet both the 1839 and 1925 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map identify it in Gothic lettering as St. Peter's Well, the typographic convention mapmakers traditionally reserved for ancient or sacred sites. The gap between what the cartographers recorded and what survives in living memory is quietly striking.

The well takes its name from the Apostle Peter, born Simon, who received the name Cephas from Christ, an Aramaic word meaning rock, rendered in Greek as Petra and so into the familiar form. Until around 1800, according to the antiquarian John O'Donovan writing circa 1840, a pattern was held here on St. Peter's feast day, the 29th of June. A pattern, in Irish devotional custom, was a communal gathering at a sacred site, typically involving prayers, processions, and circuits of the well or associated monument, often on the feast day of the patron saint for whom the site was named. The practice appears to have died out at Ballymitty by the early nineteenth century, leaving no trace in local memory, only the name preserved on successive maps. The well sits roughly a hundred metres west of Ballymitty church, a proximity that likely reflects the common habit of founding Christian sites near pre-existing sources of water considered significant.