It is dedicated to Saint Nicholas, a figure most people associate not with early Christian devotion but with Christmas, department stores, and red suits. That the well is tucked invisibly into a hillside cleft, essentially unreachable to a casual visitor, gives it a fitting obscurity for a saint whose historical identity has been so thoroughly buried beneath later mythology.

The well appears by name, in gothic lettering, on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1941. The later edition adds the phrase "Site of", suggesting that by the mid-twentieth century even the physical structure had become uncertain or lost. The Saint Nicholas in question was a fourth-century bishop from what is now Turkey, widely celebrated for his generosity and gift-giving, and recognised as the primary historical model for the Santa Claus figure. His feast day falls on the sixth of December. Holy wells dedicated to him are not especially common in Ireland, which makes this Wexford example quietly notable. The antiquarian John O'Donovan, writing around 1840, recorded the well but noted that no pattern was held there. A pattern, in the Irish tradition, was a communal gathering at a sacred site, usually on the patron saint's feast day, involving prayer, ritual circuits of the well, and often a fair or festivities. The absence of one here suggests this was always a modest, local place rather than a site of wider pilgrimage.