It appears on Ordnance Survey sheets from 1904 and 1937 under the name St Ann's Well, yet it was not flagged as an antiquity, and on the earlier 1842 survey it does not appear at all. What looks like a straightforward dedication to a popular saint may, in fact, be something considerably older.

Local research points to a more layered history. Around the mid-twentieth century, D. J. O'Sullivan, compiling notes on the parish of Inniscarra around 1955, proposed that the name St Ann's Well was most likely a corruption of Santan's Well. Santan, in this account, was a disciple of Saint Finbarr, the sixth-century founder associated with Cork city and with University College Cork, whose name is still attached to the site there. If O'Sullivan's reading is right, the well carries an early medieval dedication that has been quietly disguised by a phonetic drift towards a more familiar saint's name, a process that happened to many Irish holy wells over the centuries. Adding another layer to the site's biography, local information records that the well was once put to a thoroughly Victorian use: it supplied water to a hydropathic establishment situated roughly 400 metres to the south. Hydropathic establishments were health resorts built around the therapeutic use of water, popular in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the well's output was apparently considered suitable for the purpose. Today the well itself is sealed under concrete, its water and whatever older ritual memory it carried no longer visible or accessible.