The ground gives nothing away; the well has been filled in, and not so much as a depression or a worn stone marks where it once stood. Holy wells were, and in many places still are, sites of local veneration, typically associated with a patron saint and visited on particular feast days as part of a practice known as a pattern. That this one has vanished entirely from the landscape makes it a peculiar kind of historical absence.

What is striking about the Drumcliff well is the gap in its documentary record. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map series in 1836, one of the most thorough surveys of the Irish landscape ever undertaken, the well was not recorded. It appears only on a later edition produced between 1940 and 1941, by which point it was considered significant enough to be both depicted and named. Whether it had simply been overlooked in the original survey, or whether it came to local prominence in the intervening century, is not clear. Either way, the well occupied a slight south-south-west-facing slope in otherwise unremarkable pastoral ground, a modest and easily missed feature even before it disappeared altogether.