By 1982, when the site was formally described, there was no stone lining to speak of. By 1985, a researcher noted there was no trace of it at all. The well had, in the most literal sense, disappeared back into the earth.

The site sits within the earthworks of Kilbixy, a deserted medieval borough near Ballynacarrigy in County Westmeath, and it may once have served as the town well for that settlement. A motte and bailey, the raised earthwork platform of a Norman fortification, lies about 370 metres to the north, and the remains of a medieval church, hospital, and graveyard cluster some 220 metres to the north-east. This was, in other words, a functioning and fairly substantial community at some point in the medieval period. The well was dedicated to St. Brigid, who according to tradition blessed it during her wanderings through Westmeath, and it was known locally as St. Brigid's Well long before it acquired the anglicised form of the name.

The richest account of the well comes from a 1938 folklore collection, when a twelve-year-old schoolgirl named Nuala Cregg recorded a story told to her by her grandfather, James Killean of Joanstown, then eighty-five years old. His account describes a well that served a thickly populated district and sheltered a solitary trout, origin unknown, which local people fed with bread crumbs until it became quite tame. A man named Friel caught the trout, killed it, cooked it, and ate it. The following morning he was a cripple, and exactly a year later he was dead. The well's end came through different means: a newly appointed parson's wife objected to people crossing the land to reach it and had it closed. The next morning the well was reportedly flowing with full force from the rocky slope of a neighbouring farm. The parson and his wife, the story goes, soon left the district.