Most holy wells survive because people kept returning to them. This one, dedicated to Saint Molua, was simply in the way of road-builders, and the spring that once fed it now emerges quietly to the east of the road, unvisited and largely forgotten.

Before construction of the road around 1760, the well known as Thubbermolooa was described by the historian William Carrigan as a great pool, lying partly across what would become the road's path and partly into the bog to the west. The road-builders filled the pool and redirected the spring by drain rather than diverting around it entirely. By the time the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled in 1839, the displaced spring attracted, in the surveyor's own words, no veneration or devotion from the inhabitants of the district. And yet, as the same letters note, a patron, the traditional Irish gathering held on a saint's feast day, was still being observed on the 4th of August, Saint Molua's festival, suggesting the memory of the place had not entirely faded even if the well itself had. A medieval wooden statue of the saint, which had been associated with the well, was later moved to the Roman Catholic church built in 1859 in the nearby townland of Killaloe, roughly 250 metres to the south. It likely originated, however, not from the well at all but from a medieval church at Killaloe, one now so thoroughly gone that nothing remains visible at ground level. The statue travelled; the well stayed put, buried under tarmac.