Rising to 3.2 metres, the box-like enclosure of cut and dressed limestone is topped by four triangular projections on a plinth, each facing one of the cardinal points, with a stone-cut cross surmounting the eastward-facing one. A date-stone on the structure reads "St. Coleman's Well, enclosed the 15th of August 1868". The actual spring sits at the bottom, just 0.4 metres across, accessible by a single step through an opening on the east side. The well itself is modest; the building over it is anything but.

The site is known locally as Tobercolman, the well of Saint Colman, patron saint of the nearby parish of Kilcolman. Holy wells of this kind were typically the focus of a pattern, a local devotional gathering involving prayer, circuits of the well, and often a fair or communal assembly, held on the feast day of the associated saint. Here, that day fell on the 29th of October, and the practice was still being observed in the 1840s, noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters of that period. By the mid-1950s, however, folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair recorded that the pattern had ceased. The Schools' Collection, compiled in the late 1930s from pupils at Kilcolman National School, preserves older layers of belief around the well: that cures had been effected by its waters, and that the water was never used for boiling or household purposes by those living nearby. One story explains why the well stands where it does rather than beside the old church. According to local tradition, an old woman washed clothes in the original well, which had been situated in the graveyard close to the ruins of the old church. Saint Colman responded by relocating the well roughly a quarter of a mile away from the sacred ground.

The well sits in pasture on a north-northeast-facing slope in the Shanid barony, within a concrete-walled enclosure measuring roughly 6.5 by 9 metres. Visitors approaching across farmland should look for the limestone structure rising unexpectedly from the field; its height and formal geometry make it unlike anything you might expect to find in open grazing land. The photographs taken by Ó Danachair in 1954 are held by the National Folklore Collection at UCD and are accessible through the Dúchas digital archive, giving a useful sense of the site as it appeared when the pattern was still within living memory.