What appears to be a modest stone mound, roughly four feet high in a field in Gortroe, Co. Cork, is in fact a covered holy well of some architectural ingenuity. A passage cut into the sloping ground to the south-east runs for six yards before opening into a small chamber, where a flagged well measuring just two and a half feet by one and a half feet sits beneath a lintelled stone roof. Lintels are large flat stones laid horizontally across uprights to form a ceiling, and here they create an interior that is entirely stone-built and deliberately enclosed. On the outside, the covering takes a hipped form, meaning the roof slopes inward on all sides rather than ending in a flat gable, giving the structure a low, rounded appearance that blends into the landscape.

The well is known locally as Tobar Partalam, a name that links it to Saint Bartholomew, one of the apostles whose feast day falls in late August and around whom a number of Irish holy wells are traditionally dedicated. A stone-lined channel carries the water away from the well and out into the surrounding field. There was once an annual gathering held here, the kind of devotional assembly known in Ireland as a pattern, typically observed on or near a saint's feast day and combining prayer with social occasion. According to local knowledge recorded by Myler in 1998, that gathering had not taken place for well over a century by the time it was noted, and the well by then had become neglected and overgrown. Roberts, writing a decade earlier in 1988, recorded that the well was still venerated, suggesting a quiet, informal continuity of regard even after the communal ritual had lapsed.