It is a modest thing, a rough stone setting in a marshy hollow, and the sea covers it when the spring tides run high. Seaweed drapes it when the water retreats. Yet this is St. Mochuda's Well, also known locally as St. Cudget's Well, and for generations it drew crowds from across the district who came not just to pray but to dance, wrestle, play football, and occasionally settle their differences with their fists.

The well is dedicated to St. Mochuda, and tradition holds that he built a church close by; the site of that chapel, known locally as St. Cudget's Church, sits about 130 metres to the north on the Chapel Bank. A pattern, the old Irish custom of gathering at a sacred site on a saint's feast day, was held here annually on Lammas Sunday. Ó Danachair, writing in 1958, noted that the well was no longer visited by that time, though it had formerly been the focus of a large pattern. Accounts collected from children at Donabate School in the late 1930s, as part of the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection, preserve vivid memories of what those gatherings were like: singing Irish airs, dancing, games, the recitation of the Rosary, and the placing of white stones and small offerings around the well's edge. One account records that when the water is clear, those white stones are still visible on the bottom. The water was credited with curing whooping cough, locally called the chincough, and a story was told of a nearby household struck by serious illness that no doctor could remedy, until a child drank from the well and the sickness lifted. The school accounts also note frankly that drink was taken and that fights broke out between the people of Donabate and Portrane, which gives the pattern a texture that devotional records rarely capture.

The well sits in the salt marsh at the Burrow, in front of what the school accounts identify as Mr. Smart's house, roughly 60 yards from the Chapel Bank. Access to this stretch of coastline is on foot across low-lying ground, and the tidal nature of the site means timing matters; the well is most visible at low tide, when the fresh spring water runs clear. The reeds and marshy growth described by Ó Danachair make it easy to walk past without recognising it for what it is. The ruined chapel site to the north provides a useful landmark for orientation.