Over the well, two modern slate slabs have been set upright; one of them carries a carved human figure and the name Tobar Fionnáin. The well was traditionally visited on the 16th of March, a date that places it just one day before the feast of St Patrick, and its water was said to cure rheumatism. The St Finan honoured here is believed to be St Finan Cam, one of several early Irish saints of that name, the epithet "cam" meaning crooked or bent in Irish.

The well's history is tangled with local authority and religious tension in a way that a piece of folklore collected in 1938 from pupils at Knightstown School makes vivid. The story goes that the Knight of Kerry, the hereditary title of the Fitzgerald family who held land on Valentia, took against the pattern day visits to the well and ordered it closed. His steward, described as a Protestant with no belief in holy wells, went further and had the adjacent field ploughed. Shortly afterwards, the Knight's daughter, then in England, fell ill. In a dream she saw that her recovery depended on her father reopening the well to visitors. She wrote to him, he relented, had a wall built around the well, and permitted the pattern to resume. The steward, who had also fallen ill, recovered once the well was reopened. The story sits neatly within a wider Irish tradition of cautionary tales about the consequences of suppressing holy wells, but the specific detail of the Knight of Kerry gives it a grounding in the particular social landscape of the Iveragh peninsula, where the Fitzgeralds were a powerful Protestant landowning presence among a largely Catholic tenantry.