The assumption is understandable; the fountain is striking, it sits opposite St James's Church, and local tradition is persuasive. But the numbers do not add up. The fountain stands some 320 metres west of St James's Gate, while a lease document from 1620 places the well roughly 14 metres from that same gate. The fountain and the well, it turns out, are almost certainly not the same thing.

The documentary evidence that exposes this misidentification comes from the Dublin Assembly Rolls of 1620, which record a lease granted to James Veldon, a tanner, for a plot of ground just outside St James's Gate. The lease is unusually precise: the plot measured 23 feet east to west and 28 feet north to south, and its northern boundary was fixed at 45 feet from the gate, at "the well called Saint James well." That puts the medieval well at around 13.7 metres from the gate, consistent with a separate medieval well recorded to the south of St James's Gate, catalogued as DU018-020055. Gerry Branigan, writing in his 2012 survey of ancient and holy wells of Ireland, had described the well in connection with this part of the city, though local belief had by then attached the name firmly to the later fountain. The fountain itself dates from 1790 and is a notable piece of street furniture in its own right: a fluted Portland stone obelisk with oval sundials on each face, a ball finial at the top, carved human masks on the plinth, and cast-iron wall-fountains on three elevations. It was restored in 1995.

The obelisk fountain is freely visible on James's Street and straightforward to find. What is rather harder to see is the medieval well, whose recorded location to the south of where St James's Gate once stood places it in a part of the city that has changed considerably over the centuries. Anyone interested in the archaeology should note the National Monuments Service record DU018-020055, which cross-references the well's location as distinct from the fountain. The exercise of standing at the fountain and then pacing the 320 metres back towards the Gate gives some tangible sense of how far local memory can drift from the documentary record, and how a handsome piece of eighteenth-century stonework can quietly absorb a much older story.