Both faces of that stone carry plain Latin crosses, incised simply and without decoration. The well itself is a good spring held in a rectangular cistern, and the whole arrangement is modest enough that it would be easy to pass without a second glance. What makes Tobar Michíl quietly remarkable is less what you can see than what was, and in some small measure still is, practised there.

The well is named for the Archangel Michael, and Michaelmas, the feast day falling on the 29th of September, was once the occasion for a pattern here. A pattern, in Irish folk tradition, is a gathering at a sacred site combining devotional rounds with communal celebration, and they were once a fixture of the rural religious calendar. At Tobar Michíl, the custom involved nine circuits of the well while reciting the rosary, with pebbles used to keep count of the rounds, a practical mnemonic that appears at holy wells across Ireland. Water was drunk and applied to the skin for the cure of headache, toothache, warts, and other ailments, and small offerings were left at the site. Caoimhín Ó Danachair, writing in 1960, noted that large numbers formerly gathered on Michaelmas, though by that point only a few still came to make their rounds. The well also supplied water for ordinary domestic use, and local legend attached a guardian fish to the spring, said to be inseparable from it: water taken from the well along with the fish refused to boil until the fish was returned.

Photographs taken by Ó Danachair himself in 1947, now held in the National Folklore Collection at UCD, show the well and its surroundings as they appeared in the mid-twentieth century, and they give some sense of a place that has always been more functional than elaborate. The cross-inscribed stone on the bridge, measuring 0.32 metres high and 0.18 metres wide, is easy to overlook precisely because it is so plainly made, set into an everyday piece of rural infrastructure rather than a formal shrine.