No carved stone, no votive niche, no formal surround of any kind marks the spot, only a couple of small stones resting on a nearby boulder. The well itself is a natural horizontal fissure in the lakeshore rock, roughly twenty centimetres across and about thirty centimetres deep, open to the water's edge and containing a scatter of coins left by those who knew what they were looking for.

The site is known locally as An Tobar Beannaithe, meaning the blessed well, or alternatively Tobar na bhFaithní, which translates roughly as the well of the warts. That second name points directly to its reputed function: the water was said to cure warts, a specific and practical claim of the sort that attached itself to countless Irish holy wells, where the sacred and the medicinal were rarely distinguished. Holy wells in Ireland were typically associated with a patron saint or a local tradition of rounds, the ritual circuit of a site made on a particular feast day, though no such detail is recorded here. What survives at Formaoil is simply the physical fact of the well itself and the coins that suggest, however quietly, that some degree of belief or custom has persisted into recent times. The information about the site comes from T. Robinson, whose name is familiar to anyone who has studied the geography and folklore of Connemara and the Aran Islands in depth.