The well itself is a small thing, roughly twenty centimetres across, with edges worn soft by natural erosion rather than shaped by any mason's hand. A pipe leads the water off to a cattle trough in a field to the north-east, which gives the site a resolutely practical air today. Yet local tradition held it as a Lady well, a designation linking it to Marian veneration, and people apparently continued to treat it as such into the 1930s.

The disagreement about what this place actually is runs through the historical record in an interesting way. Writing in 1934, a commentator named Bowman was firm on the point: mass was offered near the well during the Penal Laws, and a priest was killed there, but it was not, in his view, a holy well. The Penal Laws, which severely restricted Catholic worship in Ireland from the late seventeenth century onward, drove clergy to conduct Mass in remote outdoor locations, sometimes called Mass rocks, and the secrecy those gatherings required made them vulnerable to exactly the kind of violence Bowman described. McCarthy, writing in 1991, was more cautious, recording only that tradition associated the site with such gatherings. Whether the well's sacred reputation grew from those clandestine Masses, or existed independently before them, the sources do not say. What remains is a spring in the scrub, quietly fed in winter and abandoned by its own tributaries each summer when the streamlets to the north-west run dry.