No votive rags hang from nearby branches, no coins press into the mud around the source. What survives is the spring itself, the parish church of St Helen's sitting some sixty metres to the east, and a single piece of historical testimony: around 1840, the scholar John O'Donovan recorded that people came here seeking a cure for sore eyes. He noted no pattern day, the communal annual gathering that typically anchored devotion to Irish holy wells, leaving the well's ritual calendar, if it ever had one, unrecorded.

The dedication points toward Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine and one of the more consequential figures of the early Christian world. Constantine was the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, and his mother did not follow him into the faith until late in her life, after he had defeated his rival Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge on the Tiber in AD 312, reputedly fighting under the sign of the Chi-Rho, the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek. Helena spent her remaining years in the Holy Land, commissioning churches and, according to tradition, discovering the remains of the True Cross on Mount Calvary. She died in 326 or 328 AD, and her feast day falls on the 18th of August. It is a long way from the hills of Wexford to fourth-century Jerusalem, but dedications to Helena appear across Ireland and Britain, often attached to wells associated with healing, particularly of the eyes, which became one of her specific intercessory attributes.