What makes it worth attention is not merely its age but its interruption: the Pattern day held here every fifteenth of August, one of those communal acts of devotion and gathering that once structured rural Irish life around the feast of the Assumption, simply stopped in 1798 and was not revived for over two centuries.

The well was already named on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, appearing as Lady's Well, a dedication almost certainly to the Virgin Mary, which is common across Ireland at wells associated with the feast of the Assumption. A farmhouse that once stood roughly forty metres to the south-south-east has since disappeared entirely. The scholar Eugene O'Curry recorded in the OS Letters of 1839 that the Pattern day had been held annually until it ceased in 1798, the year of the United Irish rebellion, though whether the two events were directly connected is not stated. The water was regarded as a cure for colds and was deliberately kept apart from ordinary household use, a distinction that reflects the reverence typically attached to holy wells in Irish folk tradition. A hawthorn bush grew at the well, which again is characteristic; hawthorn is closely associated with sacred and liminal sites throughout Ireland. Not far away, around 750 metres to the west-north-west, a bullaun stone survives, one of those basin-shaped hollows carved into rock whose precise purpose remains debated but which frequently appear in the vicinity of early Christian sites.

The well lay overgrown and largely forgotten until local people cleared and uncovered it in recent years. An annual pilgrimage has since been reinstated, and a local group has installed signage and an information plaque at the site, giving the place a renewed presence in the landscape after more than two hundred years of absence from active devotional use.