The surveyors noted it in gothic lettering, the typographic convention reserved for antiquities, and by the time a revised edition appeared in 1925 the label carried the quiet addendum "Site of", confirming what had been suspected for over a century: whatever devotional life had gathered here was long gone.

The scholar John O'Donovan, working around 1840 as part of the Ordnance Survey's place-name and antiquities project, recorded the well and noted that pilgrims had ceased visiting it around 1820. Holy wells were focal points for patterns, the local term for stations of prayer and communal gathering tied to a saint's feast day, and their abandonment often went unrecorded, fading out without any single moment of closure. O'Donovan's note captures the well at exactly that threshold, recent enough that people still remembered the custom, distant enough that no one was practising it. The well itself sits at the foot of a gentle west-facing slope, on the northern side of a northeast-southwest lane, and its spring now feeds a land-drain rather than a site of reverence. The remains of Rathumney church lie roughly 480 metres to the southeast, a proximity that was almost certainly not accidental: wells and early ecclesiastical sites frequently occur together in the Irish landscape, the water source lending sacred significance to the ground long before any formal church was built, or the church lending its authority to a spring that was already considered special.