A signpost reading 'St. Finbarr's Holy Well' marks it out, but the structure itself is unassuming: a shallow basin, no more than about twenty centimetres deep, enclosed on its western side by a line of stones and partially covered by a lintel set into the wall to its east. Holy wells of this kind are ancient features in the Irish landscape, typically venerated as sacred water sources associated with a particular saint, and often used for patterns, the traditional local gatherings of prayer and pilgrimage held on a saint's feast day.

St. Finbarr is the patron saint of Cork city, said to have founded a monastery at the site of what later became Cork Cathedral in the sixth or seventh century. His name attaches to a number of wells and sites across the county, reflecting the way early medieval saints accrued sacred geography over centuries of local devotion and storytelling. Whether this particular well in Derryduff was a genuine site of Finbarr's activity, or whether his name came to be associated with it through folk tradition, is not recorded. What survives is the well itself, its stone enclosure, and the woodland that now frames it.