What makes the arrangement quietly intriguing is that those channels may not be original to the well at all. Researchers have suggested they could be reused flumes, the wooden or stone troughs that once directed water to power an early mill, repurposed here and absorbed into the holy well's fabric at some unknown point.

The well's association with St Patrick rests on a tradition that he passed this spot on a journey from Cashel to Lismore, and the site receives a mention in a tenth-century life of St Declan of Ardmore, which gives it a documentary presence going back over a thousand years. Healing properties attributed to the water were specific and varied: tradition held it effective against sore lips, sore eyes, scrofula (a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes, once common enough to have its own folk cures), and other chronic ailments, either by drinking or by washing in the stream. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century as field notes on Irish antiquities and place-names, further recorded that the well was particularly associated with the cure of headaches. The enclosing stone wall, capped with stones set upright on edge, received renovation work during the 1950s and 1960s. A small marble plaque installed in 1969, donated by the Casey family of Casey's Stores in Clonmel, depicts St Patrick and carries an inscription asking visitors to pray for the donors, with the word "donars" preserving a spelling that has its own unintentional charm.

The well is accessible through a small gate in the southeast, painted green and white and decorated with an iron cross. It sits in close proximity to St Patrick's Church, making the two easy to take in together, and the channelled water running off into the pond gives the site an active, living quality that purely decorative enclosures rarely have.