It is a modest enough thing to look at, walled in stone to about a foot above ground level and banked up on the outside. Yet the well known in Irish as Tobar Eoin Baiste, the Well of John the Baptist, carries an unusually dense weight of local belief: that its water never goes stale however long it is kept, that a golden fish lives within it whose removal causes water to refuse to boil, and that a blind man once received his sight here after a vision of the saint himself.

The ritual practice recorded around this well is specific in its detail. A pattern, meaning a communal gathering of prayer and sometimes festivity held on a saint's feast day, was formerly observed here on the 29th of August, the date associated with the beheading of John the Baptist, and devotional rounds continue to be made on that day. To pay the round, a person walks the circuit of the well nine times, using nine berries or pebbles to count each pass, dropping one at each circuit. Three sups of the water follow, taken with a blessing. Offerings left at the cross-marked stone included coins, buttons, pins, and, from women, a tassel cut from a shawl. Schoolchildren in Breac-Cluain recorded these customs in detail between 1937 and 1938, capturing a living tradition: the water was said to cure headache, toothache, and other pains, and the trout, rather than the golden fish of the other legend, was held to be a sign of healing in itself, visible only to those who would be cured. The well lies about 150 metres north-east of Kilmurry church, which places it within a cluster of early ecclesiastical remains on the Dingle Peninsula, a part of Kerry where such sites survive in unusual concentration.