But this well, known on Ordnance Survey maps since 1841-42 as Toberruane, from the Irish Tobar Eoin, has accumulated more names, miracles, and cautionary tales than most places many times its size. Locally it has been called St Owen's Well, St Senan's Well, and, in at least one account collected in 1938, St Luke's Well, a plurality that says something about how living oral tradition reshapes a site over generations.

The ritual attached to the well is precise. Pilgrims visit on three Saturdays in the year, the ones falling before May Day, Midsummer, and Michaelmas, and they perform nine rounds, circling the well nine times while reciting three rosaries. The water was held to cure sore eyes, rheumatism, and sore ears; people drank it in three sips, washed the affected part in the small stream flowing from the pool, and left tokens behind, pieces of cloth, rosary beads, medals, holy pictures, or a tassel from a shawl. The folklore collected from several local schools in the 1930s describes offerings hanging from the whitethorn bush beside the well, which places the site within the broader Irish tradition of the rag well, where votive rags are left to transfer illness or invoke healing. The legends gathered around the well are equally layered. Some visitors reported seeing a blessed trout in the water. One account describes a man who opened his eye after completing the rounds to find the diseased matter floating on the surface, whereupon a fish rose and carried it away. Another tells of the patron saint saying Mass at the well when priest hunters arrived during the Penal era; he finished the Mass, mounted his horse, and the horse rose into the air and landed on the nearby hill of Cnoc an Fhómhair. A third story, collected in two slightly different versions, concerns a local man who set a savage bull to patrol the well and prevent pilgrims reaching it. The bull left the pilgrims unharmed and turned on its owner, killing him within three days. To the east of the well stand two old ringforts, Lismoyle and Lisheenanouity, their Irish names, Lios Maol and Lísin an Ultaigh, suggesting a landscape that was already old when the well's Christian associations were first forming.