The Irish place-name tradition recorded by O'Leary in 1918 translates its name as the well of the curing of the ague, that is, the recurring fever and shivering fits associated historically with malaria and other febrile illnesses. That a specific cure was attached to this particular source of water, and that the name stuck long enough to be written down, says something about how seriously it was once regarded by people in the locality.

The structure itself is modest but deliberate. Three sides are enclosed in brick walls nearly a metre high and about forty centimetres thick, with limestone lintels laid across the top to form a low roof. The whole thing sits at the roadside, unenclosed, open to the fourth side. Casey, writing in 1983, noted that "Rounds" were performed here up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Rounds at a holy well typically involved a ritual circuit of the site, often repeated a set number of times, sometimes accompanied by prayers or the recitation of specific intentions, a practice found across Ireland at wells associated with healing or with particular saints. That the custom persisted into living memory at the time Casey was writing gives the site a continuity that its small physical scale might not immediately suggest.