The pattern, as such gatherings of prayer and ritual were known in Ireland, had already fallen out of practice by around 1820, according to the scholar John O'Donovan, writing some two decades later. Yet the well itself has not been abandoned. It is still maintained, still topped with a cross, still furnished with a niche for a statue above the opening, and still connected by a stone-lined channel, some 31 metres long, to a stream that surfaces again in a pond to the east, where it meets the flow from nearby St. Anne's Well.

The dedication here reaches far beyond Wexford. This is a well named for St. James of Compostela, the same James the Greater who, according to the Gospels, witnessed the Transfiguration, was present at the Last Supper, and kept watch in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was martyred in Jerusalem in 43 AD, making him the first of the Apostles to be killed. The tradition that his remains were later brought to the Iberian Peninsula gained extraordinary momentum in the early ninth century, when they were said to have been discovered and installed at Santiago de Compostela in the north-west corner of Spain. From that point the shrine became one of the great pilgrimage destinations of medieval Christendom. The Camino, as the pilgrimage route is known in Spanish, carried political weight as well as spiritual significance, helping to consolidate Christian resistance to the Muslim kingdoms that then controlled much of the peninsula. That a small well in a corner of County Wexford should carry the name of this particular saint speaks to how widely the cult of St. James extended its reach, threading itself into local devotional geography far from the roads of northern Spain.