It is modest in scale, barely eighteen inches across and two and a half feet deep, yet it has been venerated as a holy well, drawing visitors not as a curiosity but as a place of genuine devotional significance. That proximity to the house is not incidental. The well is thought to be contemporary with the structure beside it, suggesting the two were conceived as part of the same sacred arrangement rather than accumulating their association over time.

St Gobnait is one of the more compelling figures in early Irish Christianity, a sixth-century abbess particularly associated with County Cork and venerated across Munster. Her name surfaces most prominently at Ballyvourney, where a pattern day is still observed in her honour, but her presence is felt at several sites across the region. The pairing of a domestic or ecclesiastical structure with a well is a recurring feature of early Christian sites in Ireland, where water sources were folded into the devotional landscape and invested with healing or protective qualities. Here, the well's dimensions and its relationship to St Gobnait's House were noted by the scholar M. J. O'Kelly in 1952, providing a mid-twentieth century record of a site that had already acquired its layered meaning across many centuries. The stone surround and steps visible today are the result of later reconstruction, though the well itself occupies its original position.