That ambiguity is part of what makes this site worth attention. The well itself was removed during land reclamation works in the 1970s, but the contradictions surrounding it stretch back much further than that.

Ordnance Survey correspondence from 1839 recorded that the well had been "stopped up six years ago", placing its closure around 1833. Yet O'Kelly, writing in 1969, described it as an active site: a holy well dedicated to the Holy Trinity, beside which a pattern, the traditional Irish gathering held at a sacred site on a fixed feast day, was still observed on the second Sunday in July. Beside the well, O'Kelly noted a Mass bush, a particular kind of landmark associated with outdoor worship during the Penal Laws, when Catholic religious practice was suppressed and congregations gathered in secret around a designated tree or shrub to hear Mass. Whether the well had quietly reopened after its supposed closure, or whether the 1839 report was simply mistaken, is not clear. Several springs in the area feed into a small stream nearby, which may have contributed to the confusion about the well's precise location or its status at any given point. The pattern O'Kelly described, with its fixed calendar date and continued local observance, suggests a living tradition that outlasted whatever administrative record had written the well off more than a century earlier. The land reclamation of the 1970s appears to have been more conclusive.