Holy wells are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, typically freshwater springs associated with a patron saint and visited for prayer or healing, but this group is unusual for the quiet argument it has sustained over its own identity. Three wells were mapped here, and all three were labelled as St Augustine's Wells on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map and the OS Fair Plan. Yet the dedications appear to have been rather more varied than that collective name suggests.

A mid-seventeenth century pictorial map of Galway, held in the Hardiman Library at NUI Galway, references only a single well in this area, described in Latin as S. Augustini fons in australi latere montis, meaning St Augustine's well on the southern side of the hill. A 1785 survey among the Erasmus Smith papers, drawn up by Thomas Sherrard, likewise marks just one well at the south-western position. It was not until Logan's map of Galway in 1818 that three wells appeared side by side, all labelled under the same name. Writing in 1904 and 1905, Fr McErlean argued that the collective name was misleading: only the south-western well was truly St Augustine's, while the two northern wells were separately dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist. By the time of the 1944 revision of the Ordnance Survey plan, the north-eastern well was already recorded as a site only, with nothing left above ground, and no visible trace of either northern well survives today. The historian James Hardiman, writing in 1846, recorded an account of an extraordinary cure said to have taken place at St Augustine's Well in 1673, though he gives no further detail about the nature of the cure beyond that striking label.

The surviving south-western well is tidal, meaning its water level rises and falls with the sea, which gives it a quality quite different from an ordinary freshwater spring. It was restored by the Galway Civic Trust in 2000 and sits on the roadside at the high water mark, its concrete hexagonal trough and enclosing wall modest but intact. The two lost northern wells left nothing behind them.