The belief, recorded from local schoolchildren in the mid-twentieth century, was straightforward enough: look down into the water, and if your reflection looks back at you, expect joy. If it does not, expect to be dead before the year is out. One piece of folklore collected from Kilmallock National School puts flesh on this with a story of a young couple who peered in together one Sunday morning after mass, laughing as they leaned over the edge, only to find no faces gazing back up at them. They forgot the omen, married, and were later found dead in their bed, the bedclothes flung around the room. The well was also known locally as the Robbers Well, though the notes give no explanation for that particular name.

The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded the well's physical details in 1955, by which point it was already a shadow of its former self. The 1840 Ordnance Survey map labels it St Patrick's Well, and Ó Danachair described it as a shaft roughly two and a half feet square, said to have originally plunged forty feet into the ground, though by his time it was dry and filled with rubble to about six feet below ground level. He believed it probably served the early monastery at Ardpatrick, supplying the community with water. Devotional rounds, the traditional practice of walking a set circuit around a holy well while praying, were still being made within living memory of his writing, though they had since been discontinued. The well had been visited especially on the 17th of March, and the water was reputed to cure rheumatism, lameness, and rickets.

Folklore collected from Ardpatrick National School notes that the well was at that time nearly filled up on the hill, marked on the Ordnance map and known by the local community simply as Ardpatrick Well. Ó Danachair's description of rubble filling the shaft suggests the structure has continued to deteriorate since the 1950s, and visitors should not expect to find anything dramatic or maintained. What remains is, by all accounts, a largely silted and unremarkable feature on a hillside, more interesting for what people once believed about it than for what is visible today.