Above the well, set in cement, is a figure that most visitors would read as St. Michael. What they are actually looking at is something stranger: a surviving fragment of a broken Crucifixion slab, incorporated into the St. Michael effigy by a well-meaning owner who did not recognise what he had. The rest of that carved stone, which once formed the devotional focus of a significant annual pilgrimage, has been lost entirely.

Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan recorded that up to sixty or seventy years before his account, the well drew crowds of pilgrims each year on the 29th of September, the feast of Michaelmas, and over the seven days that followed. Their devotions concluded with prayers before that carved stone Crucifixion fixed into the surrounding wall. When the slab was broken, the then owner of Bayswell House, a Mr. Connell, salvaged one piece and incorporated it into a new cement figure of St. Michael, placed over the well with evident care but without recognising what he was preserving. The spring itself is now covered by a modern brick structure, entered through an 18th or 19th-century pointed doorway of cut limestone, and the small yew grove around it is enclosed by a stone wall roughly sixteen metres by seven. Holy wells in Ireland were typically associated with a patron saint and a pattern day, an annual gathering for prayer and sometimes communal celebration; here, the Michaelmas timing and the lost Crucifixion carving suggest a devotional life that was once considerably more elaborate than anything the current structure implies.

The largely reconstructed plaque now set into the walling to the south-west of the well depicts St. Michael in flight, holding a flag and a book. It is a composed, even dignified image, but knowing that it stands in place of something older and now irretrievably fragmented gives the whole enclosure a slightly melancholy quality that the neat brickwork does little to dispel.