The well itself is unimpressive by most accounts, its water now flowing into a concrete trough, its surroundings difficult to walk through. Yet for generations, people came here before sunrise on Sunday mornings, dipped a rag in the water, bathed their eyes, tied the cloth to a nearby bush, and recited three Hail Marys, hoping that a small gold or red fish would appear at the bottom of the well. If it did, a cure was on its way. The fish was the sign, and the cure was for the eyes.

The name of the well carries its own quiet argument. It is recorded variously as Tobar na bhFionn, and the translation has been contested across time. Ó Danachair, writing in 1958, rendered it as the well of the cataracts, connecting the Irish word directly to the eye condition the well was said to remedy. The Ordnance Survey Name Books of 1841 offered a different reading: the well of the pearls, with the note that "fune is pearl which signifies that it takes the pearls off the eyes." Either way, the name circles back to the same affliction. By 1841 the well was already described as a place where people gave rounds, a term for the ritual circumambulation of a holy site, on Sunday mornings for the curing of sore eyes and defective sight. A Mrs O'Connell, interviewed during a local archaeological survey in 1985, recalled that when she arrived in Cordal roughly thirty-eight years earlier, everyone in the area came to the well for eye complaints; her own daughter Mary, whose pupil had been damaged when a cow kicked her in the eye, was said to have been cured by the water. The folklore collected from local schools in the mid-twentieth century adds further texture: one story tells of water taken from the well that refused to boil until the trout found inside it was returned; another records a thirsty traveller who found the water so refreshing he called it the well of the wine.

The well carries a cautionary story as well as a curative one. A man who bought the surrounding land built a fence around the well and cut down the rag bushes that had accumulated over years of pilgrimage. He later went blind with cataracts that could not be removed. By the time researchers visited in 1985 and again around 2000, the well no longer appeared to be in active religious use, though a steady flow of water continued to issue from the spring.