Locally, it is treated as a holy well, a category of site scattered across Ireland in considerable numbers, where spring water became associated over time with religious significance, healing, or the memory of a particular person. What makes this one quietly unusual is the name it carries and the story attached to it.

The well is known as William Scott's Well, and local tradition holds that it was named after a man who died at that precise spot. Nothing more is recorded about who William Scott was, when he lived, or what brought him to that exposed hillside above an old mountain road. The well's status as a holy well may have grown from that association, or the association may have attached itself to a spring that was already regarded as significant. Either way, the result is a site where a name has survived in local memory without the usual scaffolding of documentation to explain it.

The well sits just below the old Waterville to Killorglin road, which itself traces a route across the Iveragh peninsula that predates the more modern roads through the region. Visitors approaching from that old roadway should expect rough upland terrain, and the pool itself is modest, a small gathering of spring water rather than any kind of formal structure.