The spring once fed a small stream of roughly a kilometre in length, running south-east to the head of what is now Lady's Island Lough, a body of water recorded in the seventeenth century under the older name Lough Togher. The well itself appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1940, labelled in gothic lettering on each edition, which is the standard cartographic convention for antiquities and places of traditional significance. But by the time the antiquarian John O'Donovan was writing around 1840, the well was already out of use. He could not even record a pattern day, the annual feast-day gathering at which communities would pray, walk circuits, and sometimes leave offerings at a holy well. Locally, it was remembered simply as a spring that had never been venerated.

There is some uncertainty about which saint the well was actually named after. The historian Hore, writing in 1949, suggested it might originally have been associated with St. Iberius, also known as Iobhar of Begerin, who is the patron of the wider parish. Begerin was an early monastic island in Wexford Harbour, and Iobhar is a figure with deep roots in the local religious landscape. The more likely candidate, however, is St. Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth-century scholar and martyr whose legend describes her converting pagan philosophers before being condemned to death on a spiked breaking wheel. When the wheels miraculously disintegrated, her persecutors resorted to burning her instead. Her supposed remains were discovered in Egypt in the eighth century and, according to tradition, translated to the monastery at Mount Sinai, which still stands today. Relics attributed to her reached Europe in the eleventh century, and her cult spread widely as a result. Her story proved popular enough to generate dedications across the continent, including, perhaps, this quiet spring in south Wexford. The cult had an unusual modern chapter: in 1969 the Roman Catholic Church removed her from the liturgical calendar on the grounds that the details of her life were too uncertain to verify, before quietly reinstating her in 2002.