It answers to no name on either edition of the Ordnance Survey maps, yet locally it has long been called Tobar na Coróine, the Rosary Well, a name that carries the suggestion of something older and more ceremonial than a domestic water supply.

The well's status as a holy well is genuinely uncertain, which is part of what makes it interesting. The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair investigated it and found no living memory of religious devotions, concluding that it probably had never functioned as a holy well in the formal sense. Yet the Irish Folklore Commission Schools' Collection tells a different story, or at least a different rumour. A Mrs Jude O'Connor, born in 1846 and of Maglass, had heard that rounds were once made at the well, though she was clear she had never witnessed them herself. Rounds, in Irish devotional practice, refers to the ritual circuit of a holy site, typically performed on a patron saint's feast day, often barefoot and accompanied by prayers. Her account, preserved in folklore gathered by Ballymacelligott School, sits as second-hand testimony at one remove from living practice, the memory of a memory. To complicate matters further, the well was long associated with the townland of Ballyegan in the sources, and it was O'Hare, writing in 2000, who argued it most likely sits in neighbouring Coolgarriv instead.

The surrounding landscape adds further layers. Immediately to the south of the well lies a large fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone beside a water source, usually dated to the Bronze Age. A short distance to the east stand the remains of Nohoval church and graveyard, set within what may be an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure. Whether the well's name and any associated devotion grew up in relation to that church is not recorded, but the clustering of these features, prehistoric, early Christian, and folkloric, in a single marshy corner of Kerry is not easily dismissed.