The colour gives the place its name, Faill Dearg, meaning Red Cliff, and the water seeping from it was once considered curative, sought out by sick people who could not even make the journey themselves and sent others to fetch it on their behalf. What makes the site quietly unusual is a question that local memory could never quite settle: whether it was ever truly a holy well at all.

Folklore gathered from Ballymacelligott School captured this ambiguity with some precision. Seaghan Taidhg Óig Linehan, born in 1845 and dying in 1910, had witnessed rounds being performed at the well, rounds being the ritual circuits of prayer made at sacred sites, a practice recorded across Ireland from early Christian times. He passed this memory to Tom Flynn, born in 1891, of Baile Breathnach. But Tom Flynn's father Maurice was firm on one point: Seán, as Linehan was known, had never described the well as holy, and Maurice believed he would certainly have said so if he thought it were. Tom Flynn himself was unsure whether Linehan had seen rounds performed or merely heard of them. Thomas Burke, born in 1883 and living nearby, remembered stories of the sick sending for the water as a remedy, which suggests a reputation for healing that operated independently of any formal religious designation. The water itself had a certain practical standing too; a chemical analysis reportedly found it second in quality only to the Curraheen source that supplied Tralee's drinking water.

By the time O'Hare wrote about the site in 2000, the cliff face was still identifiable at that acute bend in the road, and local people still associated the dripping water with curative properties. The site, however, was no longer being visited.