It does not appear to carry the weight of a holy well, those sacred springs scattered across Ireland that accumulated centuries of devotion, patron day rituals, and votive offerings. It is not named for a saint. What makes it quietly worth noting is the particular bureaucratic attention paid to something so ordinary: surveyors in the early twentieth century thought it significant enough to record twice, once as a small circular feature on the 1914 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and again on the larger-scale 1:2500 plan surveyed between 1912 and 1916, where it is labelled, plainly, as "Well".

The Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, which began in earnest in the 1820s and continued through numerous revisions into the twentieth century, was one of the most thorough cartographic exercises ever applied to any country. Surveyors worked at a level of detail that captured not just roads and townland boundaries but field features, earthworks, and water sources that might otherwise go entirely unrecorded. That this particular watering hole in Gortnaporia appears on two separate survey products suggests it was a functioning and recognisable feature of the agricultural landscape at the time, the kind of thing a farmer would have relied upon and a surveyor would have been expected to mark. Whether it remains in any recognisable form today, or has been absorbed into drainage works and field improvements, the notes do not say.