The well house is modest almost to the point of invisibility, yet it has drawn people to this spot for generations, and on the last Sunday in July it still does. That Sunday is known both as Garland Sunday and as Domhnach Chrom Dubh, the latter name invoking an older, pre-Christian layer of meaning that clings to the festival despite centuries of Catholic practice. The water from the spring was traditionally believed to have curative powers, and the ritual of visiting such a site, known as a pattern or in Irish a "pattern" from the word patron, typically involved a prescribed round of prayers or circuits performed at the well and at nearby cairns or stations.

The well house itself dates from the eighteenth or nineteenth century and is built from rough limestone blocks bonded with clay mortar, roofed with flat stone slabs. It measures just over two metres in each direction and stands 1.65 metres high at its eastern face. A plaque above the doorway sets out the traditional round of prayers still associated with the site. Inside, two small recesses are set into the walls; at the time of the last recorded visit, these held plastic religious statues, a devotional picture, and a number of cups left by pilgrims. The flagged area directly in front of the doorway covers a channel that carries overflow from the spring eastward downslope, where it becomes a shallow open drain. It was noted as far back as the 1838 Ordnance Survey Letters that one of those wall recesses once contained a small inscribed stone, though this appears to have been removed at some point before modern records were made. Two penitential cairns, which are small mounds of stones where prayers are said as part of the pattern, stand just to the south of the well, all enclosed within a rectangular walled enclosure of comparatively recent construction. Roughly forty metres further south lie the remains of an early medieval church and its associated graveyard, suggesting that the sanctity attached to this corner of Mayo has deep and layered roots.