When the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded it in 1839, the well was noted as no longer visited for any devotional purposes, which places its abandonment somewhere before the documentary record even begins. Holy wells were once central to Irish popular religious practice, drawing people on feast days for prayers, offerings, and the circuit known as a pattern, where participants would walk a prescribed route around the well, often on the saint's day to which the site was dedicated. This one, it seems, had already gone quiet.

The well sits in a band of trees beside the stream and has accumulated at least two Irish names over the centuries, which itself suggests a long and layered history. The Ordnance Survey Letters called it Tubber Maoin, or Maon's Well. By the time the historian William Carrigan wrote about it in 1905, the local pronunciation had shifted to Thubbervweenia, which he rendered as Tiobar-Mhaighne, meaning Maighin Well. Whether the saint's name had genuinely changed in local memory or simply been reinterpreted over generations is unclear, but the drift is telling. Carrigan also noted the ash tree shading the well, described in 1839 as very large and by 1905 as venerable, the same tree growing older in the written record as the well itself receded from use. A pattern had formerly been held there on the 21st of January, a winter date unusual enough to suggest the well once had a specific dedicatee whose feast fell on that day, though who exactly that was has not survived with any certainty.