Drystone construction uses no mortar, the stones relying entirely on their own weight and careful placement to hold together, and the technique gives this modest well a quietly ancient feel quite out of proportion to its size. A glass left beside the water is perhaps the most telling detail: somebody has been here recently, and will likely be back.

The well has long attracted devotional attention. According to the folklorist Liam Price, writing in 1946, a pattern was held here on the fifteenth of August, the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady. A pattern, from the Irish "pátrún" meaning patron, was a gathering at a sacred site on the feast day of its associated saint or, as here, of the Virgin Mary; such gatherings typically combined prayer, the ritual circling of the well, and a degree of festivity that the Church periodically tried to suppress. The modern shrine to the west of the well, carrying a statue of Our Lady, suggests that the Marian association has held firm across the centuries, even if the formal pattern day has faded. Flowers have been planted in the hollow, and the spring feeds a small stream that runs away to the west, folding the whole modest arrangement into the surrounding landscape with very little fuss.