What was once a carefully constructed sacred water source, brick-encased and vaulted over, is now entirely invisible, swallowed by suburban development without leaving so much as a name on a gatepost.

The well appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map, where it is labelled "Abbey Well" and marked approximately 70 metres to the south of Cork Abbey, in the parish of Oldconnaught. Holy wells in Ireland were typically natural springs that became associated with Christian devotion, often linked to a nearby monastic site or a local saint, and this one's proximity to Cork Abbey suggests exactly that kind of connection. When the Ordnance Survey officers passed through the area in 1837, they recorded it in their fieldwork letters as a fine spring well, encased in brick and vaulted, which indicates it had been given a degree of formal treatment at some point, perhaps to protect the water source or to make it more suitable for ritual use. By the time the 25-inch map was revised in 1863, it was annotated simply as "Well", the "Abbey" prefix quietly dropped. The description from the 1837 Ordnance Survey Letters was later published in an edited volume by O'Flanagan in 1927, which is how this small detail of its construction survived.

Today, there is no visible trace of the well. The site lies within a housing estate, and nothing marks where it once stood. For anyone interested in finding it, the 1837 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, accessible through the OSi historical mapping viewer online, gives the clearest indication of its position relative to Cork Abbey. The well's absence is itself part of the record here. The maps, the survey letters, and the compiled archaeological notes kept by researchers including Geraldine Stout, Padraig Clancy, and Caimin O'Brien are now the only evidence that this particular spring, once thought significant enough to vault in brick, ever existed at all.