The well now known as Saint Man's Well was said to have migrated, moving of its own accord roughly 480 metres southward from its original position beside the parish church of Ishartmon to its present location at Ballyboy. The reason, according to local lore, was an act of desecration: a woman had washed clothes in it, and the well, affronted, simply left.

The well is almost certainly named after Saint Munna of Taghmon, a significant early Irish ecclesiastical figure whose feast day falls on the 21st of October. The name appears in gothic script on both the 1839 and 1940 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, suggesting that the site was considered worth recording even as its religious life, if it ever had one in any formal sense, had faded. Holy wells in Ireland were frequently the focus of a pattern, an annual gathering of prayer, ritual, and communal activity held on the feast day of the associated saint, but there is no record of any such observance ever taking place here. The well sits in low-lying ground a few metres north-west of a small stream, and by all accounts it was not venerated in the ways more celebrated wells were. It is, in short, a place that carried a name and a story without accumulating the devotional customs that kept other wells visible and maintained.

Today the well is not visible at all, buried under whatever crop happens to be growing. It survives primarily as a local description, a small shallow hole, and as a migration legend that places the blame for its displacement on a single careless act. That the well could be wronged, and could respond, says something about how water and sanctity were understood to interact in the Irish landscape, where even an unmarked depression in a field might once have carried obligations.