The structure looks, at first glance, like something very old, but the domed casing was only built around 1960, erected over two lintels that cap a much earlier subrectangular stone-lined well. Tucked into a niche near the top of the dome, above the well-opening itself, is a cross-incised slab measuring roughly half a metre tall and just seven centimetres thick. The well looks south over Lough Currane, and that position on the hillside, quiet and slightly removed, gives a sense of why places like this accumulated significance over centuries.

The well is dedicated to Saint Finan, known in Irish as Tobar Fhionáin, and a pattern, the traditional Irish practice of making circuits of a sacred site while reciting prayers, was formerly held here each year on the 16th of March, Saint Finan's feast day. A pattern typically involved walking prescribed rounds of the site, often barefoot, while reciting decades of the rosary, combining pre-Christian ideas about sacred water and circular movement with Catholic devotional form. The writer Hayward recorded a vivid account of what the pattern here once involved: three circuits and fifteen decades of the rosary. His informant, a man named Patrick Carey, recalled that in his own youth hundreds of people would gather at the well, but that by the time Hayward was writing, only a small number of older people still came to make the circuits, and that visits were made not only on the feast day but on any Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, as a remedy against illness or general misfortune. That gradual falling away, from hundreds to a few, from a fixed annual occasion to a quiet weekly habit among the elderly, traces a pattern of decline familiar to many such sites across Ireland, where the communal ritual slowly contracted into something more private and, eventually, almost invisible.