The well itself occupies a roughly semicircular area about two metres across, with a large ash tree growing on the slope immediately to its north and a concrete sill, added in more recent decades, bearing the inscription "Saint James" in the cement. Today the water is used by cattle, which is a quietly telling detail: a site that once drew people seeking cures now serves a wholly practical purpose, the sacred function dissolved into the agricultural.

The well was traditionally associated with the cure of disease and toothache, which places it within the wider Irish practice of visiting holy wells, known as "patterns" (from the Irish "patrún", or patron saint), where the faithful would pray, walk circuits, and sometimes leave offerings or rags tied to nearby trees. Stout, writing in 1984, noted that the well had not been in active use for over fifty years at that point, suggesting the practice died out sometime in the early twentieth century. There is an additional layer of displacement embedded in its history: the Schools Manuscripts record that the well was originally located further south, at a place called the "Well Tree" in the adjacent Park townland near the village of Killea, and that it was moved northward from that original position at some point in the past. The precise circumstances of that relocation are not recorded, but the fact that the collective memory of its former site was preserved at all, passed on through schoolchildren's accounts of local lore, suggests how seriously communities once held these places.