Visits must be made on Sundays, and specifically in the window between cock-crow and sunrise. The rounds, a traditional form of devotional circuit around a sacred site in which the pilgrim walks slowly while reciting prayers, must consist of three full rosaries. Any offering left behind, a rag, a hairpin, a few coins pressed into the bark of a nearby tree, is part of the ritual logic. The well's reputation is for one particular ailment: sore eyes, cured by rubbing the water directly onto them. What makes the place quietly puzzling is that the cure, the timing, and the prohibition against profane use are all so precisely articulated across multiple independent traditions, as if the well itself had insisted on its own conditions.

The folklore is layered and not entirely consistent, which is itself informative. Traditions collected from schoolchildren in Listellick and Tralee in the late 1930s and preserved in the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection agree on the broad outline: a priest was killed here during the Penal Laws, when Catholic worship was suppressed and clergy operated in hiding, and a well sprang up at the place of his burial. One account names him as Rev. Father Murphy. Another account, possibly reflecting a separate origin story, describes stones falling from a cart on a Sunday and the well appearing at that spot. A third tradition, recorded by folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair in 1958, adds a series of memorable prohibitions: the water will not boil, and it will not flow beyond the field boundary. A landlord identified in one account as a man named Colisands of Oak Park Demesne reportedly attempted to pipe the water to his house; it refused to travel as far as the east fence. When a 1940 visit by the Co. Kerry Field Club found cut architectural stones with ogee moulding lying nearby, apparently unconnected to the well's structure, nobody could explain where they had come from. By 1958, Ó Danachair noted that formal devotions had ceased, though the well itself remained: a rectangular masonry structure roughly five feet by three feet internally, vaulted over with an arch that had partially collapsed and been replaced with stone lintels.

One detail from the Listellick school tradition is oddly specific and easy to overlook. The well once had a cover, and a stone set into the high wall on the right-hand side of the Tralee to Abbeydorney road, directly opposite the well, was said to bear an inscription of the cover's keys. Whether that stone and its inscription survive is not recorded.