The name itself signals a dedication to the Virgin Mary, a pattern found at hundreds of holy wells across Ireland, where a natural water source becomes a site of Marian or saintly veneration, often observed on particular feast days through a ritual circuit known as a pattern or turas.

The well appears by name on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, and was still considered worth recording on the revision made around 1900. That kind of cartographic continuity is not unusual for holy wells, which tend to persist in local memory and practice even as other features of the landscape are renamed or forgotten. What does set this site slightly apart is the addition of a small oratory built around 1950, noted by O'Kelly in 1969. An oratory in this context would be a modest devotional structure, little more than a shrine enclosure, erected to give the well a more formal religious focus. Its construction in the middle of the twentieth century suggests the well retained an active following well into living memory, at a time when many comparable sites had already fallen quiet.