The well sits roughly a hundred metres west of the old parish church of Screen and its associated graveyard, a proximity that was rarely accidental in the Irish landscape. Springs were frequently drawn into the orbit of early Christian sites, their pre-existing sanctity absorbed and redirected rather than suppressed.

What gives this particular well its historical texture is a note recorded by John O'Donovan around 1840. O'Donovan, the scholar and topographer whose fieldwork for the Ordnance Survey produced an invaluable record of local tradition and placename lore across Ireland, noted that patterns had been held at the well on the 27th of September each year until around 1820. A pattern, from the Irish "pátrún" meaning patron, was a gathering held on a saint's feast day at a well or other sacred site, typically combining religious observance with music, dancing, and socialising. By the time O'Donovan was writing, the practice at this well had already lapsed for some twenty years, suggesting the kind of quiet discontinuity that overtook many such gatherings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, partly through suppression by the Catholic Church, which grew increasingly uncomfortable with the more boisterous elements of pattern days. The September date likely points to a local patron saint's feast, though the specific dedication of this well is not recorded in the surviving notes.