It is, or rather was, part of a carved Crucifixion plaque, and the story of how it came to be misidentified and absorbed into an entirely different religious figure is one of those quietly melancholy accidents of preservation that Irish sacred sites occasionally produce.

The well was once a focus of considerable devotion. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan recorded that, up to sixty or seventy years before his time, crowds of pilgrims gathered there on the 29th of September and for the seven days following, concluding their prayers before the stone Crucifixion carving fixed into the surrounding wall. At some point the slab was broken, and most of it was lost. One surviving fragment came into the possession of a Mr. Connell, the owner of Bayswell House, who wished to honour it but, not recognising what it depicted, incorporated it into a new cement figure of St. Michael, which he placed above the well. The limestone piece that remains is small, measuring roughly 22 centimetres long and 16 centimetres high, and shows only the head and raised left arm of the original figure, the arm broken off at the wrist. The carving is done in relief, the face rendered with a broad nose, round bulging eyes set into recessed sockets, and incised lines suggesting a moustache or beard. The hair curls to the shoulder in a style associated with 14th-century carving, and there is the faint suggestion of a crown of thorns. Now embedded in cement and dotted with lichen, the limestone head peers out from the body of a winged saint holding a flag and a book, transformed by a well-meaning mistake into something it was never meant to be. The holy well itself, set within a yew grove, a tree long associated with Irish sacred sites, lies about ten metres to the north-east, and the whole ensemble sits within the walled grounds of Bayswell House.