The well known locally as Biddy Boughy's Well carries the name of the woman blamed for its original disappearance. According to folklore collected from Balrothery School, a woman named Biddy Boughy, who lived in Chapel Lane, washed clothes in the well one day. The act polluted it, and the well dried up immediately. The older people of the village maintained that it then sprang up again in a different spot, down a small lane close to a house belonging to Mary McGann, and the relocated well kept Biddy Boughy's name ever since.

The well appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map, simply annotated as 'Holy Well', which places it firmly in the landscape before the folklore was formally recorded. When the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair visited in 1958, he found a good well of clear water, stone-lined to ground level, still being used as a domestic water supply. He noted no tradition of devotion or religious practices at the site, which sets it slightly apart from the more ceremonially observed holy wells elsewhere in Ireland, where patterns, the traditional rounds of prayer and ritual walking, were commonly maintained into the twentieth century. By the time H.A. Wheeler recorded it in March 1973, the well still held water, roughly two feet deep in a round basin about two feet three inches in diameter, with a concrete top over what appeared to be an older stone lining beneath. By 1992 the basin, measuring roughly 0.68 metres across and 0.6 metres deep, had been covered over with board, soil, and general dump material, and any local memory of veneration had faded. It was uncovered again in March 2014 by a group of holy well enthusiasts.

The well is reached from a lane off the old road that runs through Balrothery village. Given its history of being buried under dumped material, it is worth checking recent accounts before making a visit, as the condition of small sites like this can shift considerably over a few years. The structure itself is modest, a stone-lined basin rather than any elaborate monument, so the interest lies less in what you see than in what surrounds it: the particular quality of a place that was mapped, forgotten, blamed for a domestic transgression, relocated in folk memory, and quietly rediscovered more than once.