The well would once have served the buildings facing onto the streetfront, supplying water to households and businesses in the way that such features commonly did before piped water made them redundant and forgettable.

The excavation, carried out in 1999 under licence, exposed what little remained of the original built environment at the rear of the street. The well itself survived in recognisable form, but most of the associated structures that had once stood nearby had been effectively erased, not by time alone but by the installation of underground petrol tanks at some point in the intervening centuries. It is a small irony that the infrastructure of one era of fuel and supply replaced, and largely destroyed, the equivalent infrastructure of a much earlier one. The well's probable late seventeenth-century date places it in a period when Irish towns were slowly rebuilding and reorganising after the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, and the streetscape it served would have been relatively recently re-established at the time of its construction.