Known as Glunóg, the well sits on what was once the farm of a man named Daniel Cahill, unmarked on Ordnance Survey maps and now largely screened by bushes. A sally tree, the Irish term for a willow, once grew over it so densely that the well was said to be covered entirely by its canopy. That tree, and the stories attached to it, give the place much of its character.

The folklore collected from local schools in the mid-twentieth century, as part of a nationwide effort to record oral tradition, preserves the well's rituals in some detail. Paying rounds, a practice common at holy wells across Ireland, involves walking a prescribed circuit around the site while praying, often a set number of times. At Glunóg, rounds were performed on St John's Day and at Michaelmas, and the timing was strictly observed: visitors had to arrive before sunrise and go unseen, or the rounds would count for nothing. Those who came washed themselves in the small stream fed by the well and took three sips of water, invoking the Trinity. Invalids reportedly travelled from considerable distances hoping for a cure, and one account describes a blind man who, after completing his rounds, saw a sow with a litter of young pigs crossing the field, an apparition that carried its own ambiguous weight. A woman drawing water after dark was said to have been rebuked by a ghostly priest for coming too late. The tree itself was treated as inviolable. A man from the nearby townland of Shanavala cut branches from it to use as thatching spars, and sometime afterwards his house burned down. No one, the story goes, has cut a branch from it since.