Not moved by flood or excavation, but, according to local tradition, by the uprooting of an ash tree. The well, dedicated to Saint Finan, is said to have shifted roughly seventy metres to the south-west when the overhanging ash that sheltered it was pulled from the ground, as though the spring followed the tree rather than the other way around. The second location, where the water supposedly resettled, is now a muddy depression buried under dense overgrowth, sitting about eighty centimetres below field level. Both versions of the well are, in any practical sense, gone.

The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 record that a Patron, meaning a local festival held on a patron saint's feast day, had been celebrated at the well each August until roughly thirty years before that account was written. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, described it as a fine spring gushing from beneath an aged ash, and noted that pilgrimages continued to be made there, particularly by people suffering from headaches, until around 1835. That combination of communal festival and individual devotional practice was typical of holy well culture across Ireland, where a single site might serve both a parish-wide gathering and a quiet personal petition in the same season. The well's stream once flowed northward into the Glashagal River, and the shallow channel it carved out over time was later absorbed into the landscape in a quietly practical way: it forms the western side of the fosse, or defensive ditch, of a medieval moated site that sits immediately adjacent.