It was not found by archaeologists looking for something. It was found because Limerick Corporation needed to lay new paving on Church Street, and the machinery met stone where there should have been only earth.

The discovery came in 2001, when archaeologist Brian Hodkinson excavated the site at No. 9 Church Street under licence 01E1183. What he found was a drystone-built well, meaning it was constructed without mortar, the stones carefully shaped and stacked to hold their own form. The well measures roughly 0.9 metres in diameter, with a depth to water of around 3 metres from its uppermost ring of stones. That top ring sits approximately 0.8 metres below the current paving level, suggesting the ground around the well had already been reduced somewhat before it was capped and forgotten. The deposits above it were all disturbed, offering no clean stratigraphic record of when or why it was sealed. The only objects recovered were fragments of red brick found within the capping material, and even these were not kept. The well does not appear on any historical maps, and based on that absence and the nature of its construction, it is believed to predate 1840, though how far back it goes remains unknown.

Church Street sits in the older part of Limerick city, and there is nothing at street level today to suggest anything lies underneath. The well is not accessible to visitors, having been covered again after the excavation, and the frontage of No. 9 gives no indication of what was found during those works. The interest here is less in visiting a site and more in knowing it exists: a hand-built shaft dropping three metres into the ground beneath an ordinary urban pavement, older than the Victorian city that grew up around it, and recorded only because someone needed to repave a footpath.