When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in the 1840s, the site was recorded as St Bridget's Well, a designation that appears in the Survey's Name Books. But the Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled around the same period, tell a different story: the well was known locally as Tobar Cholmáin, Saint Colman's Well, and district tradition has remained unanimous on that point ever since. No second well exists in the area that might explain away the discrepancy. The name on the map and the name in living memory simply do not agree, and no one has satisfactorily resolved why.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, which recorded detailed topographical and antiquarian observations gathered by local informants during the 1830s survey, noted that the well at Kilfrush Parish was frequented on Saturday evenings, particularly by people suffering from eye complaints. Two ash trees stood over it at that time. The water was believed to cure ailments of the eye, and it was customary to leave rags tied to the branches as votive offerings, a widespread practice at Irish holy wells where cloth left at the site was thought to carry away illness. Caoimhín Ó Danachair, writing in 1955, found the well still producing a good spring of clear water, though its ritual life had already changed considerably. The ash trees were gone, one or both having been felled in the intervening years, and the water had been piped away for cattle. All formal devotion had ceased by that point, though the memory of the well's former popularity remained strong among older people in the area.

Visitors to Kilfrush today will find a site that has lost most of its visible character as a place of pilgrimage. The tree that once served as a focus for offerings is gone, and the water itself has been diverted for agricultural use rather than flowing freely as it once did. There are no rags on branches, no worn path from Saturday evening rounds. What remains is the spring itself and the question of its name, which the local tradition has quietly but consistently answered in favour of Saint Colman over Saint Bridget, regardless of what the nineteenth-century cartographers wrote down.