Marked in gothic lettering on both the 1839 and 1924 editions of the OS six-inch map, Byrne's Well carries the quiet authority of a place that was once considered significant enough to name and record across nearly a century of cartography. Today, a survey of the pasture field in question finds no trace of a well at all.

The well's particular melancholy lies not just in its physical absence but in what was already being forgotten by the time anyone thought to write it down. Around 1840, the Irish scholar John O'Donovan, who travelled extensively through Ireland gathering place-name lore for the Ordnance Survey, noted that a place he called 'Burns Well' had formerly been a site where the stations were performed. Stations, in Irish popular devotion, referred to a set of prayers and ritual circuits carried out at a sacred site, typically a holy well associated with a particular saint. O'Donovan observed that the name of the saint to whom the well had been dedicated was already lost. The well had outlasted its own story. That detail was published in a later edited collection of O'Donovan's field letters, compiled by Michael O'Flanagan in 1933, which preserved this small note of erasure for posterity.