This is St. Anne's Well, a holy well, which is a type of sacred spring found across Ireland and long associated with local veneration, patterns (communal gatherings on a saint's feast day), and the attribution of healing or protective properties to the water. What sets this one slightly apart is the care that went into its physical structure: the covering and lined approach suggest that, at some point, people thought it worth maintaining properly, not just as a water source but as a place of significance.

The well sits within the parish of Raheny, and by the mid-twentieth century its days as a site of active religious or folk devotion had already passed. Caoimhín Ó Danachair, the folklorist and scholar who documented many such sites across Ireland, recorded it in 1958 as formerly of some repute but no longer venerated. A photograph he took of the well is held in the National Folklore Collection at UCD, part of a wider effort to record sites that were already slipping from living memory. The Bettyville place name attached to the well's location reflects the area's history as part of the managed demesne landscape that eventually became the public park it is today.

St. Anne's Park is a large public green space in Raheny and Clontarf, accessible from several entry points, and the well is situated towards the base of one of the park's natural ridges. It rewards a slow, exploratory visit rather than a direct march; the stone-lined access way and covering are modest rather than monumental, and easy to walk past without registering what they mark. Ó Danachair's photograph, available through the Dúchas archive online at duchas.ie, gives a useful sense of what the structure looked like when he recorded it, and is worth consulting before or after a visit.