There are no carved stones, no votive offerings, no enclosure of any kind, just an unenclosed well beside a bush. What gives the site its peculiar character is not what is there but what, according to local tradition, is conspicuously absent: the water itself once vanished overnight.

The story attached to this well explains its condition through a breach of sacred etiquette. A woman, so the tradition goes, washed her clothes in the well one evening. By the following morning, the monks of the adjacent ecclesiastical site found the well had run dry. The water had not simply disappeared; it had migrated, surfacing roughly 880 metres to the north-east in the townland of Ballynamona, where a new well duly appeared. The tale was recorded by Power in 1980 and belongs to a recognisable tradition in Irish folk belief, in which holy wells are understood to be animate and responsive, capable of abandoning a site that has been polluted or disrespected. The Brigown church and graveyard nearby form part of an early ecclesiastical site, giving the landscape around the well considerable age and religious weight, even if the well itself was not marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of either 1842 or 1905, suggesting it had already slipped from any formal or widely noted religious significance by the nineteenth century.

The well sits in farmland, modest and easy to overlook. The bush beside it is the main visual marker. For anyone interested in the parallel well said to have received the displaced water, it lies in Ballynamona to the north-east, and the two sites together form an unusual pair, one defined by absence, the other by an unexpected arrival.