The structure is less a shrine in the conventional sense and more a practical enclosure, roofed at a steep pitch to keep the elements off the water beneath. It is the kind of thing you might walk past without quite registering what it is, which is perhaps fitting for a place whose public life was formally shut down by a parish priest at some point in the nineteenth century.

The well appears on Taylor and Skinner's road map of 1777, which suggests it was already well established and considered worth marking by the late eighteenth century. By 1835 it was named St. John's Well on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping of Ireland, and by the time the revised edition was produced in 1938 to 1939, the cartographers noted it as "St. John's Well (Covered)", acknowledging that the enclosing structure had been added. That rebuilding took place in 1908. The well also carries two older Irish names, Tober Eonan and Tober Ronan, tober being the Anglicisation of tobar, the Irish word for well, suggesting that the dedication or associations of the site may have shifted over time, or that local usage preserved older names alongside the official one. A pattern, meaning a traditional gathering held on a saint's feast day involving prayer, procession, and often festivities, was held here until the practice was suppressed by the parish priest, a fate that befell many such wells across Ireland during the nineteenth century, when the Catholic clergy worked to curtail popular devotional customs they considered disorderly or theologically dubious.

The 1966 field description gives a clear picture of what the well looks like up close: a doorway just under one and a half metres high on the east side, and that small window on the west, both with stone lintels laid flat across the opening in the simplest possible way. The water itself lies in a rectangular pool within. Whether the building retains exactly that appearance today is not recorded, but the combination of an eighteenth-century cartographic presence, two Irish names, a suppressed pattern, and a purpose-built stone house over the water makes this a quietly layered place in a county not short of ancient religious sites.