Both are called Tobairín na bhFaithni, meaning something close to "the little well of the warts", and both were traditionally visited for the same cure. The distinction between them, however, was quite particular: the well near the summit was for cattle, while the one on the lower north-western slope was for people. That division, practical and quietly matter-of-fact, says something about how fluidly the sacred and the agricultural once overlapped in rural Irish life.

Writing in 1937, a source named Broker recorded that rounds, the ritual circuits of prayer made at holy wells as a form of devotion, were performed at both sites on St John's Day, the 24th of June. At the foothill well, he noted, as many as five or six hundred people would gather. The well does not appear on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which suggests either that it was not considered remarkable enough to mark at the time, or that its significance was primarily local and oral rather than cartographic. By 1982, the site had been modernised; it is now enclosed in a stone and concrete facade with concrete steps leading to the front. A recess above the well holds a statue of St John, and pilgrims continue to leave petitions and coins in the water, small physical traces of ongoing use that link the contemporary visitor to the crowds Broker described nearly ninety years ago.