It appears on no Ordnance Survey map, neither the 1842 six-inch survey nor the 1904 revision, and today there is no visible surface trace remaining. What survives is not the well itself but the knowledge that people once came here to perform a ritual, and that the ground beneath some unremarkable patch of Cork countryside was, at some point, considered sacred enough to merit the journey.

The practice recorded here is that of "rounds", a form of devotional circuit in which a pilgrim walks a set path around a holy site, usually a well, a stone, or a church ruin, often a prescribed number of times and sometimes while reciting prayers. The tradition is ancient and widespread across Ireland, blending pre-Christian and Catholic observance in a way that was quietly tolerated, periodically condemned, and stubbornly continued for centuries. At Mahallagh, O'Donoghue's 1986 account confirms that rounds were performed here, though the well itself had already left the cartographic record long before that. Adding to the sense of an older sacred landscape, a standing stone once stood approximately seventy metres to the west of the well site, a proximity that is unlikely to be coincidental given how frequently prehistoric monuments and holy wells occupy the same ground in Ireland.