It occupies a narrow strip of marshy terrain at the base of a low slope on the western bank of a small stream, one of several springs that seep out along that same gradient. There is no elaborate stone surround, no obvious marker; the ground simply becomes noticeably wetter where the well is indicated on the old Ordnance Survey maps.

A holy well in the Irish tradition was typically a spring or source associated with a particular saint, visited on pattern days, which were annual communal gatherings combining prayer, ritual circuits of the site, and often music and socialising. St. Catherine's well had exactly this character. Writing in 1839 for the Ordnance Survey Letters, a valuable series of local topographical accounts compiled as part of the great nineteenth-century mapping project, the correspondent noted that a patron, meaning a pattern day, had been held at the well on the 2nd of June until about ten years prior. The 6th of December was also kept as a holy day in the parish in honour of St. Catherine. By 1839, then, the pattern had already lapsed within living memory, the kind of quiet discontinuity that left hundreds of such sites across Ireland unremarked and gradually absorbed back into the landscape.

The medieval church and graveyard of Rathbeagh lie roughly 140 metres to the north-west, close enough that the well would once have formed part of a broader sacred geography centred on that site. The stream beside which it sits drains south-south-east into the Nore about 130 metres away. Anyone looking for the well today should expect difficult going; the area is heavily overgrown and the ground underfoot is persistently boggy, with the wettest patch roughly marking where the spring emerges.