The well is roughly two metres deep, accessible by a short flight of steps cut down to the water, and it sits in a field locals have long called the "Church field", near low mounds understood to be the remains of an old church once dedicated to St Michael and said to have served as the parish church of Lixnaw. Both the 1841-42 and 1916 Ordnance Survey maps mark it as St Michael's Well, a consistency that speaks to its quiet persistence in the landscape.

The pattern, as gatherings at holy wells are traditionally known in Ireland, was held on the eve of Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael on 29 September. Folklore gathered from Lixnaw School describes crowds arriving from the parish and surrounding districts for games, sports, and dancing alongside the devotional rounds, each round consisting of nine circuits of the well while reciting three rosaries. The well's waters were credited with curing toothache, sore eyes, rheumatism, and nervous disorders, drunk directly or applied to the affected part. Medals and ribbons were hung on a nearby tree, and rags tied to its bushes, both of these practices common at Irish holy wells as a way of leaving an offering or petition behind. A plaster statue of St Michael the Archangel was placed at the site in the 1920s, its exact date recorded differently in different sources, either 1923 or 1928, with one account attributing it to a woman from Lixnaw who had suffered a debilitating nervous illness. She told of watching a strange bird fly from her house and land near the well; she followed, performed the rounds, and recovered. The statue was erected in thanksgiving, though by the mid-twentieth century it had already been damaged, its hands broken off. The well carries one further peculiarity: a persistent local belief that its water cannot be made to boil.