What makes it quietly unusual is its shape: not the circular or roughly oval form common to such sites, but a keyhole, with a narrow funnel of about two metres leading into the well proper, which measures roughly 1.4 metres across and just under a metre in depth. The sides are cut directly from clay, with no stonework or lining of any kind. It is an unadorned, almost provisional-looking thing, and it has clearly not been tended in some time.

By around 1840, when the Ordnance Survey recorded local placename and folklore information in their Name Books, the well at Lissatunny had a very specific reputation and a very specific ritual attached to it. People came on Saturday nights, either after sunset or before sunrise, to seek cures for headaches and sore eyes. Weakly children were dipped in the water, with an outcome the Name Books describe with a certain bluntness: the child would either thrive, or give up their existence immediately after. The timing, the threshold hours of Saturday night and Sunday morning, reflects a pattern found at holy wells across Ireland, where the curative power was understood to operate at liminal moments, between one day and the next, between the ordinary and the sacred. What is less common here is the starkness of that recorded phrase about infants, which strips away any sentimentality and suggests the well was understood as a place of genuine trial rather than simple blessing.