The name on the old Ordnance Survey mapping suggests something ancient and devotional, a place where people once came to pray or seek a cure. But the well at the north-eastern foot of a steep-sided gravel ridge near Hillsborough, Co. Kildare, turns out to have no connection to Saint Augustine whatsoever. No evidence of votive offerings, no pattern day tradition, no trace of the rituals that typically cluster around a genuine holy well. The saintly name appears to be cartographic inheritance rather than historical fact, a label that stuck without any real foundation beneath it.

When the proposed M9 Motorway threatened the area in the late 1980s, an excavation led by Keeley in 1988 finally clarified what the site actually was. The well itself was not visible on the surface; the surrounding ground was waterlogged and a stand of trees marked only the general vicinity. Beneath the soil, excavators found a small rectangular arrangement of stone settings, roughly three metres long and two metres wide, marking the point where a natural spring emerged from the base of the ridge. From there, a carefully engineered channel ran downslope for about twelve and a half metres. Its construction was precise: brick sides, overlapping slates forming the base, flat stones laid across the top as a cover. A second, similar channel was uncovered a few metres to the east. Together, they appear to have formed a domestic water supply system serving Hillsborough House, the remains of which were found roughly a hundred metres to the north-east. Stone walls downslope from the well, likely the remnants of outhouses and avenue walls, filled out the picture of a modest but functional domestic complex, quietly doing its practical work beneath a name it never deserved.