Pollnagarragh, from the Irish, carries the suggestion of a rough or rugged hollow, and the well that bears this name in County Galway belongs to a category of site that appears on maps and in monument records without much further ceremony. Wells of this kind were rarely purely practical. Across Ireland, natural springs and hand-dug wells accumulated layers of meaning over centuries, functioning as sources of water, as sites of pattern days and seasonal ritual, and sometimes as places associated with particular saints or local cures. The line between a working well and a holy well was often blurred, and many such sites passed quietly out of regular use without losing their place in the landscape or the record.

Beyond its name and its classification as a well in County Galway, the specific history of this particular site remains obscure for the present. What can be said is that Galway's landscape is threaded with water features of this sort, from the limestone karst of the Burren's fringes to the boggy margins of Connemara, and that many wells were worked into the local calendar in ways that left little written trace. The Irish tradition of the pattern, a gathering held on a saint's feast day involving prayers, processions, and sometimes music or fasting, was the occasion at which many such wells were most actively used. Whether Pollnagarragh had any such association is not currently documented in available sources.