That is precisely what happened, according to local tradition, to the man who emptied St Patrick's Well to retrieve silver coins thrown in as an offering by a Protestant woman. He spent the money on drink and was struck dead as he left the tavern. It is a story with an unusually ecumenical moral, in which the Protestant woman's gesture is treated as sincere devotion and the Catholic man's opportunism as the genuine transgression.

The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded the well's details in 1955, noting that it had already appeared on the Ordnance Survey map of 1840 under the name 'St Patrick's Well'. By the time Ó Danachair visited, active devotion had ceased, but older accounts preserved the well's former purpose: it was sought out for the cure of coughs and colds, and St Patrick's Day was the occasion of particular observance. Two further legends attached to the site. One held that St Patrick himself had blessed the well, providing the usual founding story for a holy well of this dedication. The other was stranger: the well was said to have physically moved when someone profaned it, a motif that frames the water source as animate and responsive, capable of withdrawing itself from human misuse. Physically, Ó Danachair described it as a modest structure, a small well roughly lined with stone and surrounded by trees and bushes, the kind of low-key sacred site that was once threaded throughout the Irish countryside in considerable numbers.

The well sits in Bulgadenhall townland in Co. Limerick. Holy wells of this type are often easier to locate on older Ordnance Survey maps than on the ground, as vegetation can obscure a small stone-lined well entirely, and without active local maintenance many have become overgrown or partially collapsed over the decades since Ó Danachair's survey. The surrounding trees and bushes he noted may by now be considerably denser. Aerial photography held by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, taken in January 2003, provides some additional reference for the site's location and condition at that point.