According to local tradition, it moves. Specifically, it moves when someone has the audacity to wash clothes in it, which is, by any measure, an unusual form of self-defence for a body of water.

The well appears on the 1840 Ordnance Survey map under the name Toberfantan, a rendering of the Irish for Fintan's Well, connecting it to St Fintan of Dun Bleisce, whose feast day falls on the 3rd of January. Folklore scholar Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded in 1955 that the well was a clear spring roughly three feet in diameter, set within a grove of trees in Doon village. He noted that regular devotions had lapsed by that point, though the feast day had formerly been observed. The tradition of pilgrimage to holy wells, involving prayers, circuits of the site, and offerings, was once widespread across Ireland, and Toberfantan was no exception, at least until it was not. The legend of the well's relocation was also captured in the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection, gathered from Doon National School, which records how the well had previously stood at a place called Bottlehill before a woman washed clothes in it, at which point it removed itself to its present position beside the old barracks. Ó Danachair photographed the well in 1954, and those images are held by the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, accessible through the Dúchas digital archive.

The well sits beside what was formerly a barracks in Doon, a small town in east County Limerick roughly midway between Limerick city and Tipperary town. The Dúchas archive at duchas.ie holds both the Schools' Collection account and Ó Danachair's photographs, which give a sense of how the site looked in the mid-twentieth century. Visitors interested in the broader landscape of holy wells in the area will find that the Schools' Collection notes several others in the vicinity of Doon, suggesting the town sits within a territory that was once densely marked by such sites.