Known as Bride's Well, it was a site of patron festivals, the kind of communal gatherings, part religious observance and part social occasion, that were once woven into the calendar of rural Irish life at wells, cairns, and hilltops across the country.

The well is dedicated to Saint Brigid, one of Ireland's most enduring early Christian figures, whose feast day falls on the first of February. Patron gatherings at holy wells typically involved prayer, the circuit of the site, and the tying of votive offerings to nearby bushes or trees. At Bride's Well, these patrons continued into the late eighteenth century, when such observances were already in decline across much of the country, suppressed partly by church authorities uncomfortable with what they considered disorderly or superstitious practice. By the early nineteenth century, most such gatherings had faded from the landscape entirely.