The 1928 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map quietly reassigned the site the name "Tobar Fhionáin", linking it to St Finian rather than St Anne, under whose name it had been recorded on earlier maps going back to 1840. Pupils and teachers at Ardpatrick National School took the trouble to formally object, noting in the Schools' Collection folklore archive that the change was "totally against tradition" and that all the older people in the area were unanimous on the point. It is the kind of cartographic revision that, once made, has a tendency to stick, regardless of what anyone living nearby actually calls the place.

Caoimhín Ó Danachair, the folklorist and photographer, recorded the well in detail in 1955 and photographed it the previous year. His description captures a modest structure: a small oval well, roughly three by two feet, walled with dry-stone to about a foot above ground level, with an old whitethorn tree growing directly over it. A whitethorn, or hawthorn, is a tree long associated in Irish tradition with sacred and liminal places, and its presence here is likely deliberate rather than incidental. Ó Danachair noted that a large poplar had formerly stood there too. The well was dedicated to St Anne, whose feast day falls on the 26th of July, and that date had once drawn particular devotion. The practice of "rounds" at holy wells involves walking a prescribed circuit around the site, often reciting prayers, and such rounds were carried out here until around 1930. The water was believed to cure sore eyes, and the cloth used to bathe them would be left at the well as an offering, a custom common to many Irish holy wells.

The well lies in Sunville Upper, near Ardpatrick in County Limerick, a village that also has its own St Patrick's Well on higher ground. Photographs taken by Ó Danachair in 1954 and held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD give the clearest surviving impression of the well's appearance at mid-century. Visitors approaching the site today should be prepared for a modest and undemonstrative feature in the landscape; holy wells of this type rarely announce themselves. The whitethorn tree remains the most reliable visual marker. The 26th of July, St Anne's feast day, is the date most closely associated with the site, though organised devotional activity ceased here decades ago.