The well goes by two names depending on which century you consult: the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it as Heffernan's Well, with an "Old Thorn" marked alongside it, while folklore gathered in the 1930s refers to the same spot, or very likely the same spot, as St Bride's Well.

The Irish Folklore Commission's Schools Manuscript Collection, compiled during the 1930s, recorded a tradition that rounds were still being paid at the well within living memory at the time, chiefly as cures for toothache. "Rounds" in this context refers to a ritual circuit of a sacred site, typically performed a set number of times while reciting prayers, a practice common to holy well devotion across Ireland. Rags were tied to a sceach, the Irish word for a thorn bush, which stood beside the water. The manuscripts noted, with a certain finality, that the Forestry Department had planted over the site and that the well's existence was by then mostly forgotten. The thorn bush still present beside the well today may well be that same sceach, and if so it is old enough to have appeared on a nineteenth-century map. Thorn bushes at holy wells were considered sacred and were rarely cut; the fact that this one appears to have survived the plantation is quietly remarkable.