The trout is the key to everything. Catch a glimpse of it while making your rounds of the well and a cure is certain. Fail to see it, and the outcome is less assured. The well is known locally as St Batt's Well, a compression of Saint Bartholomew, and it carries the kind of layered folklore that accumulates around places where people have been coming for generations with genuine need.

The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded in 1958 that the well was surrounded by a drystone wall eighteen inches high, with boxes nailed to nearby trees containing small statues, and rags and religious objects left as offerings by visitors. The practice of doing rounds at a holy well involves walking a set number of circuits, usually in a sunwise direction, while reciting prayers; here, the prescription is nine circuits and three rosaries. Water and moss scraped from the stones are taken away for use at home, applied to sore eyes, sore throats, and rheumatism. The days that matter are the Saturdays before May Day, Midsummer, and Michaelmas, three points in the calendar that straddle older seasonal divisions and Christian feast days simultaneously. The well appears on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1840 to 1841 and again in 1939, and an earlier name recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books renders it as Thubberpaurhanaun, an anglicisation of the Irish for Bartholomew's well.

The folklore collected from several local schools in the 1930s adds texture to the place. One account tells how a woman accidentally carried the trout home in a bucket of water; when she put the water on to boil, it would not boil, and when she looked, the trout was there in the pot. She returned it to the well. Another story explains the well's current position: it was once higher up on land associated with a family named Dowling, but it moved of its own accord after a woman washed clothes in it, an act apparently sufficient to cause the well to relocate itself down the slope. Multiple accounts confirm that the water of this well, whatever else it can do, cannot be made to boil.