Recorded variously as St Cronan's Well, St Brigid's Well, and St Joseph's Well, it sits in a hollow marked by a large ash tree, southwest of the ruins of Glassmore Abbey. The accumulation of names is not unusual for Irish holy wells, where local devotion often shifted or blurred over generations, but it gives this modest pool an oddly layered quality. Folklore collected from Swords School noted that the well was once used by the nuns of a nunnery at Mooretown, and that a Mass rock stood nearby, beside a second well dedicated to St Mary, where a priest is said to have celebrated Mass during the Penal Laws era, when Catholic worship was heavily restricted and clergy conducted services in secret at outdoor sites.

The curative traditions attached to the water were specific and practical in the way that holy well lore tends to be. Children's schoolbook accounts collected for the Irish Folklore Commission in the late 1930s record that rubbing the water three times on sore eyes whilst making the sign of the cross would bring relief, and that drinking it could cure chicken pox. These beliefs were documented by the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair, who also photographed the site; his images are held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD. Archaeological investigation carried out under licence number 08E0303 found the well to be a natural spring percolating up through the subsoil into a small stone-lined pool roughly 1.4 metres in diameter. A ceramic drainpipe of late nineteenth or early twentieth-century date directed water from the source into that pool, suggesting the current structure is relatively modern. Archaeologists also identified a fulacht fia in the immediate vicinity, a type of ancient cooking or industrial site associated with the Bronze Age in which water was heated using fire-cracked stones, as well as evidence of a medieval settlement to the north.

The well is no longer venerated and carries none of the votive offerings, such as medals, scapulars, or rosary beads, that living station wells typically accumulate. It lies southwest of Glassmore Abbey, itself a ruined medieval structure, so the two sites can reasonably be visited together. The ash tree noted in the folklore accounts remains the most useful landmark for locating the spring in its hollow. The surrounding ground was metalled during the archaeological investigation, but the well retains its character as a natural feature rather than a constructed monument.