This one, tucked into a roadside ditch in Cottrelstown, County Dublin, apparently never did. When the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded it in 1958, his description was blunt and brief: 'a little well in the road dike. No tradition of devotion.' For a category of site that is usually thick with legend and local memory, that absence is itself a kind of curiosity.

The well sits south of the Grallagh complex, a cluster of monuments that includes a church, a graveyard, and a separate holy well, all recorded under the Sites and Monuments Record for County Dublin. Holy wells in Ireland are typically small natural springs, sometimes enclosed with stonework, that became associated with Christian devotion and were often visited on specific feast days in a practice known as a pattern. This particular well, however, seems to have slipped out of any such observance, if it ever held one. By the time H. A. Wheeler visited in April 1975 and recorded his observations for the SMR file, the situation had worsened considerably. He noted that the site appeared completely dry, water having been diverted by drainage works, and described nothing more than a small setting of stones in the ditch at the roadside. The physical record had shrunk almost to nothing.

The current state of the site is ambiguous. Recent survey notes indicate that there is some water visible near a stone in the bank, though whether this represents a genuine spring re-establishing itself or simply surface drainage finding its way through is not clear. The whole area is described as very overgrown. Visitors with an interest in early ecclesiastical landscapes might find it worth combining with the nearby Grallagh church and graveyard, which form the more substantial part of this monument cluster. The well itself, if it can still be called that, demands patience and a tolerance for roadside scrub; there is no marker, no path, and no ceremony to guide you to it.