A girl, according to a schoolgirl's collected account, would leave the tassel of her shawl if she had nothing else to offer. This is the kind of well that outlasted its own ritual life: no saint's name attached, no pattern day observed for generations, no cures remembered, yet the impulse to leave something behind persisted long after the formal devotions had faded.

The well goes by several names, each one a small puzzle. The Irish name Tobernagrann translates loosely as "well of the trees", though a mid-twentieth-century account by Ó Danachair noted that even by 1958 the spring had shifted, breaking out lower down the slope rather than at the original site. Folklore collected by Hannah Reidy, a pupil at Ballymacelligott school, recorded that local people called it Crann an Tobair, meaning "tree of the well", while military surveyors recorded it as Tobar na Gean. Reidy even wondered aloud whether the name might be a corruption of Coroin an Tobair, "crown of the well", though this remained an open question. The well stood on land associated with a John Leen, and in 1915 it was closed and drained, apparently by the landowner of the time. The same landowner, as the tradition has it, was later glad to re-open it. O'Hare, writing in 2000, described a site where the depression was nearly dry but a thin trickle still ran westward downslope, tracing itself through a line of rush growth. A high earthen bank that once stood to the north-east of the depression had been remembered by the then-landowner; local belief held that it might once have served as an altar. No patron saint had survived in local memory, and no specific cures were associated with the water. The rags on the whitethorn, though, the landowner recalled seeing those himself, forty or fifty years before O'Hare visited.