A well that has lost its water is a curious thing. On the western foot of a pasture slope in County Kildare, within what was once the demesne of Mooreabbey, a large rectangular hollow in the ground is all that remains of what was probably a holy well dedicated to St. Evin. The sunken area measures roughly thirty metres by twenty and drops to nearly two metres in depth; its perimeter is thickly overgrown with ash and briar, and the interior is now a waterlogged, livestock-trampled depression. There is no obvious spring, no obvious well, and no obvious sanctity left in the landscape.

The scholar John O'Donovan, writing in the Ordnance Survey Letters in 1837, noted that the well stood near the site of a monastery and had in all probability once carried the name of St. Evin, a figure associated with the religious foundations of the area. By O'Donovan's time, however, the well had been enclosed by a local landowner and was known simply as Lord Henry Moore's Well. It is a pattern that recurs across Ireland: a site of devotion absorbed quietly into the improving ambitions of a landed estate, its older name allowed to slip away. The low earthen banks that partly enclose the eastern and western sides are all that survive of whatever structure Moore put around it, and even those have eroded to little more than shallow ridges.

The site sits about thirty-five metres east of a small stream that flows south-westward to feed the River Barrow. Given the condition of the interior, heavily poached by grazing animals and without any clear source of water, it takes some effort of imagination to read the hollow as a place that once drew people for reasons beyond the pastoral.