Above it stands a house-like stone structure containing a statue of St. Broghan, and several hawthorn bushes press close around the enclosure. It is not a dramatic site. But the well has a history of popular devotion stretching back, by local reckoning, well over nine hundred years, and its pattern, the traditional gathering of prayer and festivity held at a holy well or sacred site on a saint's feast or appointed day, was drawing crowds of more than 1,500 people as recently as the 1930s.

The pattern here is associated with St. Broghan, whose feast falls on the 4th of December, though the gathering itself was held on the last Sunday in June. At some point in the mid-nineteenth century the pattern was suppressed, a fate that befell many such gatherings under pressure from a Church hierarchy increasingly uneasy with their rowdier elements. It lay dormant for roughly eighty years before being revived in 1926 by the Revd. J. Breen, curate of Clonbulloge. By 1934, newspaper accounts describe a substantial occasion: the recitation of the Rosary and an ancient litany of the Blessed Virgin said to have been composed by St. Broghan himself, followed by an aeridheacht, a festive outdoor gathering, football and camogie matches, a boxing exhibition by the Portarlington Boxing Club, and music from the Wolf Tone pipe and drum band of Carbury. The concrete wall around the well had been put up around 1925 by a local man, James Dunne of Clonsast, and the protective hood over the well was added in 1927 by Revd. Breen.

The devotional customs recorded at the well are those common to holy well traditions across Ireland, but documented here in unusually precise detail. Visitors seeking cures for bodily ailments, including stammering, would use the water and leave offerings on a specially built ledge inside the well: stones, pennies, pins, pebbles, scraps of clothing. On the hawthorn bushes nearby, people fixed bits of beads, ribbon, broken brooches, and pins, all placed on the last Sunday of June. The hawthorns are still there beside the well, as are the wall and the statue, quiet markers of a practice that once filled this flat Offaly field with several counties' worth of people.