Known locally as St John's Well, the site is modest in its dimensions, measuring roughly fifteen metres north to south and eight metres east to west, but it carries a weight of folklore that far exceeds its size. Three sacred trout are said to live in its waters, and the belief recorded locally holds that anyone with failing sight who glimpses even one of them will be cured.

The well's other name, John the Baptist's Well, points to the kind of annual gathering once common across Ireland on or near saints' feast days. A pattern, which is the Irish term for such a festive assembly, combining prayer with communal celebration, was held here until around 1850, and according to the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair, writing in 1955, it included sports and horse-races as well as the devotional rounds at the water's edge. Ó Danachair also noted traditions connecting the well to St Patrick. The most vivid account of the pattern, however, comes from the Schools' Collection of 1937, gathered from pupils at Mahoonagh National School. A child recorded the story of Eily Hartnett and Eily Moore, described as first cousins and the finest-looking girls in three parishes, who came to the well on pattern day. A whirlwind took Eily Hartnett up into the air as the crowd watched helplessly. She vanished. About a week later, the Hartnett family heard a cry from the field beside the well in the middle of the night, and saw her rising again, this time calling out her goodbyes. The account ends with a matter-of-fact explanation: she became the banshee of the Hartnett and Moore families, whose cry is heard whenever one of them is about to die. A second legend in the same school collection describes a blind child named Flanagan, whose grandmother, a woman named Griffin, carried her to the well from Ballinoe, said three rosaries, and watched the child suddenly announce she could see a trout.

The well sits in open pasture accessible from a public road running roughly east to west along its south-western edge. A gate in the modern concrete wall that encloses part of the site leads directly to the water, and just inside stands a large modern statue of Christ on a pedestal. The pond itself is enclosed further by a hedge on its western and southern sides. Photographs taken by Ó Danachair in 1954, held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD, give a sense of how little the setting has changed in its essentials. The trout, if they are there, will be easier to spot on a calm, bright day when the surface is undisturbed.