The physical act of capping the well and rerouting its flow is almost a literalisation of what happened to the devotional life around it: a tradition simply redirected and eventually lost.

The well, known in Irish as Tobar Colmáin, appears by name on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1840-41 and 1914, which suggests it was still a recognised landmark well into the twentieth century. Its patron was Saint Colman, one of several Irish saints who share the name, and the well followed the common pattern of holy wells across Ireland, where a specific calendar date, a circuit of prayers called rounds, and a belief in curative water formed the core of practice. Here, the gathering day was Midsummer's Eve, also observed as Saint John's Eve on 23 June, and the water was held to relieve aches and pains. People carried it home and bathed the affected part if illness came during the year. Folklore gathered from Ballylongford schoolchildren, now preserved in the Schools' Collection compiled in the 1930s, records this practice as already belonging to the past at the time of collection: the well, the children noted, was not visited at all anymore. A separate local tradition offers a reason for the well's decline: a woman who washed clothes in it caused it to dry up, a warning story that appears in various forms at holy wells across Ireland, where the water was understood to demand respect and could withdraw if that respect was withheld.