But gathered around this modest circular pool in a roughly D-shaped grove of thorn bushes and trees near the townland of Kilkenny in County Westmeath is a quietly extraordinary accumulation of medieval stonework, most of it broken, some of it beautifully carved, arranged as if by gradual instinct into a series of devotional stations. The well is dedicated to St Canice, the sixth-century monastic founder better known in connection with Kilkenny city, and is known in Irish as Tobar Chainnigh. By 1837, when the Ordnance Survey Letters noted its existence beside the ruins of Cainneach's chapel, observers were already recording that it was "fast losing its sanctity."

The fragments arranged around the well speak to a much denser ecclesiastical landscape than survives above ground today. Within a few hundred metres stood a medieval church with its graveyard, a castle, and an abbey belonging to the Fratres Cruciferi, or Crouched Friars, a mendicant order who took their name from the cross they wore on their habit. That abbey has since been levelled, but pieces of it appear to have migrated to the well over the centuries. An octagonal font lies to the north of the well, probably from either the church or the abbey. A V-shaped stone fragment, carved with a winged angel at what was once the apex of a niche or hood moulding, lies on the ground to the southeast. A large cut stone to the northeast is thought to be a vault rib capital from the abbey, the kind of carved block that would once have sat at the junction of a ribbed ceiling. A hexagonal base to the west holds a stone cross, possibly a finial cross from the medieval church roof. A post-medieval fleur-de-lys cross stands nearby, with a socket that once held a metal cross. A low 19th-century pillar once supported an iron chain or railing around the well itself. When the site was examined in 1981, a carved ecclesiastical figure roughly a foot high, robed and with hands joined at the chest, was visible in the font to the north. A stone corbel carved with an angel, recorded in the late 1970s, could not be located on a later visit.

The grove is heavily overgrown with thorn bushes and trees, making close inspection of many of the fragments difficult. The site sits on flat, poorly drained land, which likely accounts for both the spring's persistence and the encroaching vegetation. Visitors who do find their way here should be prepared for the kind of access that requires patience rather than a clear path.