The opening measures less than a metre across and the water sits at a depth of about half a metre, modest dimensions for a site that carried enough local meaning to attract prayer into living memory. Holy wells in Ireland were, and in many places remain, sites of devotional practice outside formal church structures, where people would visit to pray, leave offerings, or perform rounds, often on the feast day of a patron saint associated with the well.

The well goes by two names locally, which points to a small but telling piece of linguistic history. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan recorded that older people still came to pray at the site, and that some called it the Wood well while others used the name Cruckny well. Carrigan noted that the latter name is a reasonable anglicisation of the Irish Tiobar na Croiche Naoimh, meaning the Well of the Holy Cross. The survival of both a vernacular English nickname and a garbled form of the original Irish name side by side suggests a community in transition between languages, holding on to the older name in approximate form without always knowing what it meant. The dedication to the Holy Cross gives the site a specific, if now largely untraced, devotional identity rather than the more common association with a named saint.