It is easy to walk past it without understanding quite what it is, but St Mary's Well carries a longer devotional history than its modest dimensions suggest, and the identity of the saint it honours is rather more pointed than a generic Marian dedication might imply.

The date of the pattern, the traditional Irish gathering of prayer, pilgrimage, and often festivity held at a holy well on a saint's feast day, gives the game away. The pattern here fell on the 22nd of July, which is the feast of Mary Magdalen, a figure described in hagiographical tradition as a notorious sinner and penitent, and the first person to encounter Christ after the Resurrection. The scholar J. O'Donovan, writing around 1840, recorded that the pattern had been held on that date until approximately 1810, suggesting that communal observance wound down sometime in the early nineteenth century, a period when the Catholic Church was actively discouraging patterns it considered disorderly or superstitious. Despite that institutional pressure, the well is still venerated today. The dry-stone walling technique used to enclose it, stones laid without mortar to form a stable structure, is typical of vernacular construction across Ireland and lends the site its quietly functional appearance.