What makes this site quietly peculiar is the gap between what it apparently was and what an antiquarian recorded when he visited. Writing in 1879, a researcher named Brash noted the well's "insignificant appearance" and stated flatly that it was "dedicated to no saint", seemingly unaware of, or unconvinced by, any local tradition linking it to St James. The contradiction has simply been left there by time, unresolved.

Brash's account adds another layer. He recorded that "certain rounds and washings at the well, were deemed a specific for rheumatic pains and other ailments", placing this site within a very common pattern of Irish holy wells used for curative purposes, where the ritual involved circumambulating the well and bathing in or applying its water. A bullaun stone, a large boulder or rock with one or more artificial cup-shaped hollows, sits by the roadside roughly 200 metres to the north. Brash noted that this stone "lay formerly near a holy well in adjoining field", and it is almost certainly connected to the same site. Bullaun stones are frequently found in association with early Christian monuments and holy wells across Ireland, though their precise original function remains debated. Meanwhile, a farm trackway once ran eastward from the well to the road, and people are remembered as travelling from Rylane and the surrounding area to pray here, suggesting that whatever its formal dedication, the well drew a genuine local following. It is no longer in religious use.