The spring on the south-western edge of Dernish Island, a small island off the Sligo coast, has none of that. It rises quietly from a subcircular hollow barely a metre across, surrounded by a loose scatter of large stones and boulders, partly swallowed by overgrowth, with no enclosing wall and no formal structure of any kind. From there, the water trickles away in a shallow stony gully and drops over a two-metre vertical scarp onto the shore below.

The well does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, which suggests it had either faded from active use or was simply not considered significant enough to record at that point. By the 1912 edition, however, it had been given a name: Tober Patrick, the Irish "tober" meaning a well, with the Patrician dedication that attached itself to countless sacred springs across the country. What changed between those two surveys is not known. At the shoreline, roughly twenty metres south-west of the well, there are three large upright stone slabs set at the top of the scarp, and at its base a channel about two metres wide faced with boulders where the stream meets the shore. These features are puzzling; they appear to be relatively recent in origin, and whether they have any connection to the use of the spring as a holy well remains unclear. Adding another layer to the site, just eight metres to the west-north-west lies a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site typically associated with the Bronze Age, in which water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. The proximity of the two features is notable, though whether it is coincidental is an open question.