It is, by most measures, a modest thing. Yet on the 17th of March each year, pilgrims have gathered here to perform the rounds, a ritual practice in which each person collects seven small stones, circuits the well seven times, and at the end of each circuit throws a pebble down to keep count. The counting matters: the stones are a kind of mnemonic devotion, ensuring that no circuit goes unmarked. A concrete shrine now surrounds the well, topped with a large statue of St Patrick and open to the south, with a paved area in front and a worn path circling it where the rounds are still walked.

The folklore attached to this place was captured in the late 1930s by schoolchildren in Foynes and Shanagolden as part of the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection, and the accounts have a pleasing specificity. One story holds that the well itself sprang up miraculously from the spot where Patrick knelt to pray after failing to find a natural spring near the church he had founded on the hilltop. The ruins of that church remain, and prayers are still said among them, typically a decade of the Rosary. Older traditions held that the most efficacious form of devotion was to perform the rounds on both the eve of the feast day and the feast day itself, though the eve custom had already fallen out of use by the time the folklore was recorded. Pilgrims historically left tokens at the well, including medals, ribbons, bandages, articles of clothing, and crutches. One account, with a dry comic energy, describes an unnamed man who erected a money box at the well, painted green and yellow, with one end for silver and the other for pennies. When the priest sent someone to remove it, the box had already vanished, and the man's name was never found out. A blackthorn tree grows near the well, and there is also a tradition that Patrick once lost his prayer book here, and that a raven recovered it.

The hill lies roughly a mile and a half to the west of Shanagolden. The church and graveyard on the summit overlook the well site on the western slope below. The 17th of March remains the principal occasion for visiting; the parish has in recent times organised a formal procession, gathering about 300 yards from the summit before moving up to the ruined church and then to the well. Photographs taken by Caoimhín Ó Danachair in 1954, now held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD, give a sense of how the site looked in the mid-twentieth century, and are accessible through the Dúchas digital archive.