The well at Gortroe is dedicated to a saint whose feast day falls on the 29th of October, and it is that autumnal date, rather than any summer pilgrimage season, that has always given the place its particular character. Holy wells across Ireland were traditionally sites of pattern days, the word being an anglicisation of the Irish "pátrún" or patron, where communities gathered for prayer, socialising, and ritualised rounds of prayer walked in a set sequence around the site. Here, October was always the busiest month.

The earliest detailed description comes from the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840, which record the well as "much more frequented at this period, namely in October, than at any other," and mention a sallow tree of some twenty feet in circumference with "numberless rags" tied to it. The practice of tying cloth or rags to trees beside holy wells was a common act of petition or thanksgiving, the material left behind as a token of the visit. By the time the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair surveyed the site in 1955, that tree had vanished entirely. Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, noted that "the peasantry of the surrounding country assemble here in great numbers on the anniversary of the saint, and at other times." Ó Danachair recorded that the pattern itself, the full communal celebration, had lapsed around 1900, though rounds at the well continued, particularly on the saint's day.

The well sits on the western side of a stream, immediately south of Colman's Well graveyard. The enclosure, about ten metres in diameter, is bounded by a hedge with gateways on the north-east and south-east sides; a concrete path runs inside and concentric with the hedge, and a lawn fills the space between path and well. Over the spring is a whitewashed canopy topped with a metal cross, its opening facing west, with a sunken kneeling area and a steel-bar rest before it. A wooden shelf above holds religious pictures and a statue of the Madonna and Child. The whole site is clearly maintained with care and still visited. Late October, if you happen to be in this part of Limerick, is the time the place remains most itself.