Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and 1922 call it Macduagh's Holy Well, tying it formally to Saint Colmán Mac Dúach, the seventh-century founder of the monastery at Kilmacduagh. Locally, people have always called it Colman's Well, which amounts to the same association but carries a different, more familiar weight. The well itself is a modest, carefully made thing: rectangular, lined with drystone walling, roughly 1.56 metres north to south and less than a metre wide, with a single stone step cut into the southern end so that a person can reach the water. Around it stands a D-shaped enclosure defined by a low but substantial wall, partially collapsed on its north-north-western side and with what appears to have been an entrance gap at the south-east, now blocked.

When the antiquarian J.A. Fahey visited and wrote about the site in 1893, the picture was considerably more elaborate. He described the water as offering an unfailing supply and noted that the well was overshadowed by a splendid ash tree. More striking, he recorded two further enclosures nearby, which appear to have functioned as penitential stations, the kind of defined circuits or stopping points used during pattern days, the traditional religious gatherings held at holy wells, often on a saint's feast day. He also documented something called the Leaba Mac Duagh, or St. Colman's Bed, positioned close to the well's entrance: a natural arbour formed by whitethorn and hazel, sheltering a slight hollow carpeted with moss and ivy, where, as Fahey put it, the saint sometimes sought repose. By September 1982, when the site was formally inspected, one of the penitential stations could still be identified to the east of the well. The second had left no surface trace at all, and the saint's bed had vanished entirely, its hazel and whitethorn long gone, the moss-lined hollow with them.