Holy wells are among the most enduring features of the Irish landscape, places where sacred geography and everyday life once overlapped completely. The well at Tully, in County Kildare, is unusual even within that tradition, because it no longer holds water at all. What survives instead is a pair of markers, a whitethorn bush and a large stone, occupying the spot where the water once surfaced. The well's absence is, in its own quiet way, as telling as its presence might have been.

Writing in 1903, the historian Fitzgerald recorded that the well dried up following the establishment of waterworks for the town of Kildare, sited to the north-west of the well's location. The infrastructure put in place to supply a modern town effectively ended the well's life as a source of water. Whether the site had retained any active devotional use by that point is not recorded, but the whitethorn bush and the stone remained as markers, the kind of informal monuments that communities have long used to keep the memory of such places from disappearing entirely. The whitethorn, known in Irish tradition as the fairy thorn, was already deeply associated with sacred and liminal spaces well before Christianity arrived, which may explain why it persisted here as a signifier long after the water was gone.