Holy wells, as a category, are among the most quietly persistent features of the Irish landscape, typically associated with a patron saint, a pattern day, and some tradition of curative or devotional use. This one, it seems, slipped out of active memory before any of that could be properly recorded.

The earliest documentary trace comes from Dr. John Rutty, who in 1757 published his survey of Irish mineral waters and included an entry for the well of St. Lawrence Palmerstown, noting that he had actually tested the water. Rutty's work was a serious scientific undertaking for its time, and the fact that he sampled this particular well suggests it had some local reputation. By the time Noel O'Connor revisited the question in his 2003 study of Palmerstown, the picture had become considerably murkier. A description from the intervening period characterised the site as a pool roughly eight feet across, ringed by bushes and overhung by an ash tree, though it was by then being used simply for cattle to drink from. One local informant, meanwhile, referred to it not as St. Laurence's Well at all, but as St. James's Well, a discrepancy that no surviving record appears to resolve. The site was also at one point classified in the Dublin Sites and Monuments Record as a holy tree rather than a holy well, a distinction that matters for how such places are officially recognised and protected, and the classification was only corrected relatively recently.

The well was associated with Mill Lane, to the south of the old Palmerstown church and graveyard, but its precise location has not been formally identified. Anyone exploring the area today should be aware that there is no marked or maintained feature to find. The churchyard itself survives and is worth visiting in its own right, but the well remains, for now, a gap in the record rather than a point on a map.