The well sits in what was once flat, marshy ground, roughly forty metres from a small east-west flowing stream that drains into the River Barrow, land that has since been reclaimed but which would once have felt distinctly liminal, the kind of waterlogged edge-place where holy wells so often appear in the Irish landscape.

The well's Irish name, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Namebooks compiled around 1840, is Tobar bhaiste an phoill, meaning roughly "baptism well of the hole or pit." That name suggests a long-standing association with religious ritual rather than just domestic water supply. Holy wells in Ireland were typically sites of pattern days, pilgrimage, and prayer, often with pre-Christian roots absorbed gradually into Christian practice. This one was still being used for religious purposes within living memory of Drennan's 1965 account, before a piped water supply arrived and the practical need for the well fell away. The Englishman's endorsement, so carefully preserved in the Namebooks, is a small curiosity in itself: it reads like a moment of empirical seriousness applied to something that was already sacred, the two frameworks sitting together without apparent contradiction.

The well is enclosed by a low circular concrete wall with a rounded coping and a metal gate set into the gap, a modest but deliberate piece of protection for a site that the local community clearly considered worth preserving. It is located on the western edge of Gowran, close to the stream corridor that feeds the Barrow.