It is an unassuming thing, easy to miss, and yet its position beside a rath gives it a significance that outlasts any formal designation.

A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and associated with farmsteads or settlement. The proximity of a water source to such a site is rarely accidental. By the 1840s, when Ordnance Survey name books were being compiled for the Kilcolman area, the spring was already being noted simply as a "well" beside a "fort", the latter being the common nineteenth-century term for any such earthwork. That pairing of well and fort, recorded so matter-of-factly, hints at a long functional relationship between the two features, the spring likely serving whoever occupied or worked the enclosed ground across many centuries.