Motivated by its role as a central pillar of current theories of dynamics of spin ice in and out of equilibrium, we study the single-ion dynamics of the magnetic rare earth ions in their local environments, subject to the effective fields set up by the magnetic moments they interact with. This effective field has a transverse component with respect to the local easy-axis of the crystal electric field, which can induce quantum tunnelling. We go beyond the projective spin-1/2 picture and use instead the full crystal-field Hamiltonian. We find that the Kramers vs non-Kramers nature, as well as the symmetries of the crystal-field Hamiltonian, result in different perturbative behaviour at small fields ($\lesssim 1$ T), with transverse field effects being more pronounced in Ho$\mathrm{<mrow\; data-mjx-texclass="ORD">2</mrow>}$Ti$\mathrm{<mrow\; data-mjx-texclass="ORD">2</mrow>}$O$\mathrm{<mrow\; data-mjx-texclass="ORD">7</mrow>}$ than in Dy$\mathrm{<mrow\; data-mjx-texclass="ORD">2</mrow>}$Ti$\mathrm{<mrow\; data-mjx-texclass="ORD">2</mrow>}$O$\mathrm{<mrow\; data-mjx-texclass="ORD">7</mrow>}$. Remarkably, the energy splitting range we find is consistent with time scales extracted from experiments. We also present a study of the static magnetic response which highlights the anisotropy of the system in the form of an off-diagonal $g$ tensor and we investigate the effects of thermal fluctuations in the temperature regime of relevance to experiments. We show that there is a narrow yet accessible window of experimental parameters where the anisotropic response can be observed.