Holy wells dedicated to the healing of eye complaints are not uncommon in Ireland, and this one was noted in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for the parish of Cloghane as a spring roughly three feet across. By the time the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair visited in 1960, it had deteriorated to something he described as "hardly more than a muddy hole". Not long afterwards, drainage works destroyed it entirely.

The well's disappearance was not the only surprise the digging brought. Workers excavating the drain encountered what local accounts describe as a cave, though it was never properly investigated. The suspicion, noted in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, is that this may have been a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval ringforts, used for storage or as a place of refuge. The well's alternative Irish name, Tobar an Leasa, lends weight to that theory: "lios" or "leas" refers to a ringfort, and the name suggests that a fortified enclosure may once have stood nearby, leaving only its echo in the placename. If so, what was destroyed during a routine drainage job might have been the last surface trace of an early settlement whose underground archaeology remains, largely unexplored, somewhere beneath the fields west of the bay.