That depth alone says something about the slow accumulation of time and neglect; the well had not simply fallen out of use but had effectively disappeared into the hillside, waiting to be found again rather than visited.

What makes the site more than a curiosity of rediscovery is the claim attached to it by the writer MacCarthy, writing in 1937. He argued that this well marks the location of the first church in Cork, specifically what he called Barre's Church, associated with Saint Finbarr, the sixth-century monk who is traditionally credited with founding the settlement that would become the city of Cork. MacCarthy believed the church itself stood not at the well but in a scrubby, untilled patch of ground roughly twenty yards to the east of it. That patch, according to later accounts, remained much as MacCarthy had described it, neither built upon nor cleared, a small accident of agricultural indifference that may have preserved something of the original character of the site. Holy wells in Ireland were frequently associated with the earliest Christian foundations, often marking a place where a saint was said to have prayed, baptised, or settled, and the combination of a living spring, a neglected field, and a place-name rooted in the word for a church or ecclesiastical enclosure would have been exactly the kind of convergence MacCarthy was drawn to.