What makes it quietly interesting is not just its condition but a case of mistaken identity that has followed it through the scholarly record for over a century.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, labelled this well 'Tiobar na súil', meaning the Well of the Eyes, a name typically given to wells believed to cure eye ailments. The difficulty is that the name almost certainly belongs to a different holy well located roughly 150 metres to the north-west, across the townland boundary in Rathlogan. That Rathlogan well was still locally known for its curative association with eyes when fieldworkers visited it in 1987. The well in Gorteennamuck, by contrast, is associated with a saint whose name Carrigan recorded as Eelakan or Eelakun, with the alternative pronunciations Illagan and Illakan. Holy wells dedicated to obscure local saints are common across Ireland, often preserving the memory of early Christian figures whose cults never spread beyond a single parish or valley, and whose names survived mainly in oral tradition and place-names rather than in written hagiography. The saint here belongs firmly to that category, a figure whose very name resisted standardised spelling even in Carrigan's careful recording of it.