The claim is modest, the evidence thin, and the spring itself has never been formally recognised as an archaeological monument, which perhaps makes it more intriguing rather than less.

The suggestion comes from P.W. Joyce, writing in 1912, who identified this small spring as a candidate for the original "Fionn Uisce", an Irish phrase meaning "clear water" or "bright water". The park's name, Phoenix, is widely understood to be an anglicisation of that phrase rather than any reference to the mythological bird, and the spring near the Gate Lodge is one proposed source of the name. Joyce noted its position near the Phoenix column, the tall monument erected in the 1740s that still stands on the main road through the park, and placed it just outside what were then the Viceregal Grounds, the walled enclosure that surrounded what is now Áras an Uachtaráin. Geraldine Stout, who compiled the record in 2011, noted that the evidence falls short of what would be needed to list the site as an archaeological monument, leaving it in an ambiguous position somewhere between local tradition and verifiable history.

The area around the Gate Lodge and the Phoenix column is accessible from the main Chesterfield Avenue running through the park. The spring, if it still flows, is not marked or signposted, and visitors should not expect anything dramatic; a clear spring in a parkland setting is easy to overlook entirely. The interest here is less in what you can see and more in what the place might represent, a quietly contested origin story for one of Europe's largest urban parks, preserved in a footnote in a century-old gazetteer and a brief entry in an archaeological database.