The well's proper Irish name is Tobar Ceannanach, the anglicised form honouring a saint known as Canannagh. It sits roughly 610 metres east-south-east of a nearby church, close enough to suggest a long-established relationship between the two sites, yet distinct from it, occupying its own quiet place along the road.

The enclosure is modest in scale, a circular drystone construction, that is, built without mortar, relying entirely on the weight and fit of the stones, measuring about 3.5 metres across, with an entrance gap on the western side. Set into the north wall is a small alcove, and it is here that visitors have continued to leave offerings, a practice rooted in the tradition of the "pattern," the local devotional gathering at a holy well on or near a saint's feast day. The site is noted in sources going back at least to James Hardiman's work of 1846, and it appears again in O'Flanagan's early twentieth-century writings and in the 1954 guide compiled by Lord Killanin, suggesting it has drawn attention, scholarly and devotional alike, across several generations.