The landowner of the field knows it only as the "monastery field"; they were unaware, when asked, that the pool at its edge was a holy well at all. It does not appear on either the six-inch or twenty-five-inch editions of the Ordnance Survey maps, which is itself unusual; holy wells were generally noted, even when little else was. This one slipped through, and in doing so it lost most of the context that might have explained it.

The well sits within a small valley surrounded by gently rising ground, and its deeper history belongs to a complex of early ecclesiastical remains that no longer exist above ground. According to the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, a church and an enclosing graveyard once stood within the same townland of Finnan, but both were levelled around 1850 by a local landowner named Hendricken. Carrigan recorded the well under its older name, "Tubber-Finnawn", meaning Saint Finnan's well, though by his time it had already acquired the secondary name "Monastery Well", a reference to the vanished structures nearby. He noted that pilgrimages to it had continued until around 1800, when they were quietly discontinued. The well, then, outlasted the church and graveyard that gave it its original context, and then outlasted the memory of its own purpose. Carrigan placed it on the north side of Hendricken's fence, though subsequent survey work has found it to the south-west of the field boundary, which runs roughly north-west to south-east across the site; a small discrepancy, but a reminder that oral and written traditions around such places tend to shift as the physical markers disappear.