The practice of tying rags, or clooties, to the vegetation around a holy well is one of the older devotional customs to survive in rural Ireland, the cloth understood to carry a prayer or an ailment away from the person who left it. Here, the trees to the north and east of the well are dressed in this way, giving the small wooded site a quietly unsettling quality that sits alongside more formal Catholic devotion.

The well itself is a rectangular spring, lined with stone, and a stone shrine housing a figure of the Blessed Virgin stands on its eastern side. This combination, a pre-Christian water source overlaid with Marian imagery, is typical of the way holy wells were absorbed into Catholic practice from the medieval period onwards. The site sits roughly 250 metres east of Buttevant, a market town whose Franciscan friary, founded in 1251, is one of the earliest of its kind in Ireland, suggesting a landscape with a long habit of religious use. According to local tradition, the well is visited in May, which would place it within the pattern of Maytime or early summer devotions that cluster around wells associated with the Virgin or with Brigid across much of the country.