The cross has been slotted into a square mortise cut into the base, a modest but deliberate act of arrangement that hints at a longer and more complicated history for this quietly dense cluster of medieval remains. The well is dedicated to St. Kenny, an anglicised form of St. Canice, and the site as a whole holds far more than its overgrown appearance might suggest.

The well sits within a roughly D-shaped grove of thorn trees and bushes on flat, poorly drained ground, the kind of wet, marginal land that frequently surrounds sacred sites in Ireland, kept just outside the settled and the cultivated. Scattered around the well's perimeter, architectural fragments of various dates have been arranged to form a series of stations, the stopping points used during patterns or rounds of prayer that were once a central feature of holy well devotion. The octagonal limestone baptismal font lying on the ground to the north of the well originally belonged to a church standing roughly 240 metres to the south-west, and it is likely the small cross was once a finial, the topmost decorative element, either of that church or of an abbey a little further south-west still. That abbey was the property of the Fratres Cruciferi, known also as the Crouched Friars, a religious order whose name derived from the cross they wore on their habits and who maintained houses across medieval Ireland and Britain. The abbey has been levelled, and Kilkenny Castle, a separate site sharing the townland name, stands about 330 metres to the west-south-west.

The thorn growth around the well is dense enough that close inspection of the site is difficult, and the font base and cross are the clearest objects a visitor is likely to examine in any detail. The fragments arranged around the perimeter repay careful attention, as they represent several different periods of stonework gathered into a single devotional space over many centuries.