Yet this unassuming well in Mulrankin, County Wexford, carries a question in its name that has never quite been settled. The Ordnance Survey mapped it twice, in 1839 and again in 1940, marking it on both occasions in gothic lettering as St. Bridget's Well. Gothic lettering on OS maps was the conventional way of signalling an antiquity or a site of traditional significance, so the cartographers clearly considered it worth noting. But the music historian and ecclesiastical scholar W.H. Grattan Flood, writing in 1915, argued that the well was originally dedicated not to Brigid but to St. Catherine, which would give the site a rather different devotional character and raises the possibility that the Brigid attribution, however long-established on paper, may have displaced an older local memory.

The well sits in a fairly level stretch of landscape, with a small north-south stream running just to its west. It is a modest construction: a subcircular hollow lined with stones, roughly 55 centimetres across and 50 centimetres deep, with a large flat stone embedded in the ground nearby. Holy wells in Ireland were traditionally sites of pattern days and rounds, where people would pray, leave offerings, and walk a prescribed circuit, but there is no sign that this one was used in that way, at least not in recent memory. What gives the spot a quietly layered quality is its immediate surroundings. The remains of Mulrankin church lie about 160 metres to the north, and a tower house, the kind of fortified residential structure common to late medieval Leinster, stands approximately 100 metres to the south-southwest. The well occupies a point within a small cluster of monuments, each from a different register of local life, ecclesiastical, domestic, and devotional, gathered within a few hundred metres of one another on an otherwise unremarkable piece of ground.