Known in Irish as Tobar Chéitinn, or alternatively as Tobar Naomh Céitinn, the site carries the linguistic hallmarks of a holy well, a type of spring or water source traditionally associated with a saint and visited for purposes of prayer or healing. And yet, according to An Seabhac, the pen name of the Kerry writer and scholar Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha, writing in 1939, it is not a holy well at all.

The tension between these two positions is quietly telling. The prefix "Naomh" in the alternative Irish name means "saint", and the name Céitinn is associated with Seathrún Céitinn, the seventeenth-century Tipperary-born priest and historian known in English as Geoffrey Keating. Whether the well has any genuine connection to Keating is unclear from what survives, but the folkloric memory attached to it is specific enough to be interesting: local tradition holds that rounds were made here hundreds of years ago. Rounds, in Irish devotional practice, refers to the ritual of walking a set circuit around a sacred site, often a well, a stone, or a church, while reciting prayers, a custom that persisted in many parts of Ireland long after the Reformation. The fact that this practice is remembered in connection with a well that one authority flatly refuses to classify as holy suggests the site occupied some ambiguous, contested place in local religious geography.

Caoimhín Ó Danachair, writing in 1960, recorded the "Tobar Naomh Céitinn" name, suggesting the tradition had not entirely faded even by the mid-twentieth century. The site lies in the Léim Fhir Léith area of the Corca Dhuibhne region, the Irish-speaking heartland of the Dingle Peninsula, where the landscape holds an unusually dense concentration of early medieval and prehistoric monuments and where local oral knowledge has historically preserved details that written records missed or dismissed.