That detail alone sets it apart from the more typical holy well enclosed by a low stone wall or sheltered beneath a hawthorn. Around it stand fourteen rocks, seven close and seven at a distance, and on these stones local tradition held that the marks of St Patrick's knees and body could be seen, left behind on a night when the saint passed through the land, grew thirsty, and stopped to drink.

The account of this well survives through the Irish Schools' Collection, a nationwide folklore-gathering project conducted in the 1930s in which schoolchildren recorded oral traditions from their local communities. Teresa Shanley of Fearmore, Walderstown, collected the details from Kathleen Duffy of Fairfield, and the precision of the description is striking: the well lies approximately two hundred yards east of the Bruigh-da-Choga and roughly the same distance from a boreen marking the boundary between Bryanmore and Fairfield. The well was credited with curing stomach complaints and warts, though not casually. Stations, the traditional cycle of prayers and movements performed at a sacred site, had to be completed every three years in succession for the cure to take effect, and the appointed day was St Patrick's Day, the 17th of March, when local people gathered to pray and cast buttons and hairpins into the water. There was once a bush growing over the well, as was common at such sites, where the hanging of cloth rags or ribbons was a long-established devotional act. That bush was blown down at some point and never replaced, closing off one visible thread connecting the site to its older ritual life.