The ground around it is so dense with gorse and moor grass that the well itself has effectively been swallowed by the landscape, its precise location obscured beneath rough grazing land. That invisibility sits oddly against what the place once meant to local people: it was known simply as "the pattern", a name that points to an entire calendar of communal religious practice now largely discontinued.

A pattern, in Irish folk tradition, is a gathering held at a sacred site, typically a holy well, on the feast day of the saint to whom the well is dedicated. In this case that saint is Michael, and the pattern day fell on the Sunday nearest to his feast, the 29th of September. O'Sullivan, writing in 1992, recorded that people with eye complaints would travel to the well, wash their eyes in the water, and recite particular prayers in the hope of a cure. This kind of curative practice was extremely common at holy wells across Ireland, where specific ailments were understood to correspond to specific saints and specific sites. The association between St Michael and this well on Knockanallig placed it within a wider network of Michaeline devotion along the western seaboard, though the precise origins of the well's use here are not recorded.

Anyone curious enough to look for it should be prepared for the fact that the well may simply not be locatable on foot. The gorse and moor grass that defeated earlier searchers are not the kind of vegetation that clears with the seasons, and Bere Island's upland ground is unforgiving in wet weather. What remains, even in the well's physical absence, is the name and the memory: a pattern day observed, prayers said, and a particular stretch of hillside regarded, for generations, as somewhere worth going when ordinary remedies had failed.