It was once a place of active devotion, where people paid rounds, a traditional devotional practice involving circuits of prayer walked around a sacred site, and where the water was believed to cure all diseases. That communal life has long since ended, and the well itself has retreated into the landscape, but the story attached to it is still worth knowing.

The well carries the name Tobernagleenagh, recorded by the antiquarian Grove White between 1905 and 1925. The origin story he collected from local tradition explains not just the well's existence but its location, which would otherwise seem arbitrary. According to that tradition, a saint was passing through Kilmaclenine, a townland roughly two miles to the north, when he asked for a drink of water from a well there. The request was refused. In response, the saint gathered up the well in the tail of his gown and carried it away, dropping it at Ballykitt. This type of folk narrative, in which a sacred water source is relocated through a saint's intervention, often serves to account for why holy wells appear in unexpected places, or to attach a moral weight to the act of withholding hospitality. The well at Kilmaclenine lost its sanctity through meanness; Ballykitt gained one as a consequence.

The boggy hollow where it lies was still identifiable as a pond on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1937, which gives some sense of how the surrounding terrain has shifted over the decades. The well itself is now largely obscured, and there is no active religious practice associated with it.