Known locally as Tobar na nAmhrán, the Singing Well, it carries no patron saint, which sets it apart from most of Ireland's thousands of holy wells. Its dedication is simply to Our Lady, and its particular gift, according to local tradition, was the healing of sore eyes and failing sight. That reputation was, it seems, taken seriously enough by at least one member of the Croker family to attempt using the water on a horse with poor vision. The animal was found dead the following morning, and the well, so the story goes, had relocated itself five or six yards from where it had stood.

The Crokers came into possession of Ballinagarde after the Cromwellian Plantation of the seventeenth century, the estate having previously belonged to the Burkes. The family's relationship with the well was complicated. Around 1830, the landlord John Croker banned devotional visits to it and allowed cattle to damage the site, a fairly common pattern in which landlord authority and popular Catholic practice came into direct conflict. Yet nearly a century later, in 1922, Courtney Croker reversed that legacy by constructing the whitewashed, barrel-vaulted concrete structure that covers the well today, specifically, according to folklore collector Caoimhín Ó Danachair writing in 1955, to protect it from desecration. A plain Latin cross sits on the roof, and a diamond-shaped recess below it once held a marble plaque, though that has since been removed. Photographs taken by Ó Danachair in 1954, now held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD, show the well much as it appears today.

The well sits within a post and wire enclosure entered through a gate on the western side. Two limestone flags lead down into a small semi-circular area before a low rectangular opening, just over a metre high and half a metre wide, gives access to the vaulted interior. The plastered walls and accumulation of silt inside give the space a sealed, almost preserved quality. Water exits westward through a pipe beneath the lower limestone step. Performing the rounds, a form of ritual prayer circuit common at Irish holy wells, was still being observed here in the 1950s, particularly on Saturdays and on the 15th of August, the feast of the Assumption. The site was recorded as lying in the south-eastern corner of the former demesne, land that had been divided by the Land Commission in the years before the folklore was collected at Knockea National School.