The story goes that the well originally sat within a churchyard some 800 metres to the north-east, until a woman washed clothes in it. The well promptly dried up and reappeared here, in the boggy ground where it sits today, as though relocating itself out of offence.

The associated church at that north-eastern site, a separate monument in its own right, places this landscape within a broader pattern of early medieval religious activity in north Galway. Holy wells in Ireland were typically understood as sacred sources with the capacity for blessing or healing, and the belief that they could respond to profanation, by vanishing and re-establishing themselves elsewhere, appears in folk tradition across the country. What is less common is a story this precise: a named cause, a rough date carried in local memory, and a measurable distance between the old site and the new one. Scattered around the present well are large stone slabs and fragments of concrete rubble, suggesting it was at some point given a more formal enclosure, though whatever structure once contained it has largely fallen away.