Not abandoned, not overgrown, simply gone, its source disturbed by drainage operations around the turn of the twentieth century. What makes the site quietly remarkable is not what remains, which is nothing, but the administrative role this small spring once played in defining the edge of a city.

The well, known variously as Our Lady's Well and Lady Well, sat on the southern side of a stream that formed part of the boundary of the Liberties of Dublin City, in the townland of Priesthouse within the parish of Donnybrook. Its significance as a boundary marker is documented as far back as 1603, when the Record of the Riding of the Franchises of the City of Dublin described a formal civic procession that traced the limits of the Liberties. The record notes, in the orthography of the period, that the party came to 'our Lady[s] well, whear they stoode, and the trompett sownded', before moving on north-west toward the meadows and eventually the gate of Smothe's Court. A trumpet sounding beside a well in what is now leafy south Dublin is a detail that rewards a moment's thought. The well was still cartographically present in the nineteenth century, appearing by name on Duncan's 1820 map of Dublin and outlined on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1837. Writing in 1912, P.W. Joyce located its former position precisely: beside the path at the exact point where the Parliamentary boundary turns abruptly north-west, roughly one hundred and fifty yards south of a midpoint on Aylesbury Road.

There is nothing to see at the site today. The well was destroyed by drainage works, and the ground above it is now given over to college sports facilities. A visitor following Joyce's directions, tracing the old Parliamentary boundary line on a map and counting their paces south from Aylesbury Road, would arrive at an unremarkable patch of grass with no surface trace of what once stood there. The value of the visit, such as it is, lies entirely in the knowledge carried to it, the awareness that a trumpet once sounded here to mark the edge of a city's authority, and that the well which served as that civic landmark has since been drained quietly out of existence.