The ague, an old term for the fevers and shivering fits associated with malaria and similar illnesses, was a genuine and recurring misery for rural communities in early modern Ireland, which makes the well's former reputation less a curiosity than a measure of how desperate and limited the available remedies were. That a patch of boggy pasture was once a focus of annual ritual says something about how seriously that reputation was taken.

The Ordnance Survey name books of 1840 recorded the site as Tubar Parrinane, and noted that it was frequented on 24 August and considered, by those the surveyor rather pointedly called "the superstitious", to be capable of curing the ague. The date is significant: 24 August is the feast of Saint Bartholomew, and pattern days, the annual gatherings held at holy wells on the feast of a patron saint, were a deeply rooted feature of Irish popular religion. The name Tubar Parrinane likely preserves a personal name, possibly a saint or a local holy figure, embedded in the Irish word for well, tobar. By the time the nineteenth-century surveyors arrived with their notebooks, the tradition was already being viewed with a certain official scepticism, yet the fact that it was still being practised suggests it had not yet died out entirely. Today the well sits in pasture, overgrown and disused, kept alive mainly in local memory.