The well sits on a gentle south-west-facing slope, roughly two hundred metres north of the old Kilmurry South church and graveyard, and though it appears on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the cartographers recorded it without a name. That anonymity, for a site that clearly mattered to local people, is itself a small puzzle.

What the map omits, the Ordnance Survey Letters supply. Compiled in the nineteenth century as field notes accompanying the survey, the Letters record that patterns were held at the well until the beginning of the 1800s. A pattern, from the Irish word "pátrún" meaning patron saint, was a traditional gathering held on a saint's feast day, combining prayer, procession around a holy site, and, often, music and socialising afterwards. Their suppression or gradual fading through the early nineteenth century was widespread across Ireland, driven partly by Church reform and partly by the disruption of the post-Famine decades. That this well lost its pattern before the Famine suggests it had already slipped from active devotional use by the time the surveyors arrived to sketch and measure the landscape around it. The proximity to the earlier church and graveyard at Kilmurry South hints at a longer history of sacred association with this particular corner of ground, though the well itself was never formally recorded with a dedicatory name.