The structure looked, at first inspection, like a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically constructed during the early medieval period, often associated with ringforts and cashels, and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation. Here was one sitting quietly to the south-east of a cashel, a stone-walled early medieval enclosure of the sort found across the west of Ireland, and the combination seemed to point towards something genuinely significant.

Nearly a decade later, in September 1991, a follow-up visit brought the matter to a more grounded conclusion. The structure was not a souterrain at all. It was a well, built in the traditional drystone manner, accessed by a stepped approach, and already known to local people by exactly that description. The gap between those two inspections captures something quietly instructive about fieldwork: a feature that reads as archaeologically charged in one context can turn out, on closer examination, to be a piece of entirely practical rural infrastructure. The cashel nearby remains on record, and the well sits in its shadow, having briefly suggested a more dramatic past than it actually holds.