What makes it quietly unusual is not any great accumulation of legend or ritual around it, but rather its neat, almost domestic architecture: a subcircular chamber barely a metre across, covered by a domed brick canopy no taller than a person, with a north-facing opening framed by a limestone sill and two small projecting masonry piers. There are no votive offerings left at the water's edge, no ribbons or rosary beads, no trace of the communal devotional gatherings known in Ireland as patterns, where people would once walk a prescribed circuit of prayers around a well on a saint's feast day.

The well appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1840, marked in the distinctive gothic lettering reserved for antiquities and places of note, which suggests it was already regarded as a site of some significance when the surveyors passed through. Its dedication to Saint Mary almost certainly reflects its connection to the medieval parish church of Rosslare, roughly 1.3 kilometres to the north, which was itself dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. That church, now a ruin, would have served the wider area before the present Catholic church at Tagoat was built, and wells associated with a parish's patron dedication were common features of the religious landscape in pre-Reformation and post-Reformation Ireland alike. Archaeological testing carried out in 2001, at points around 70 metres to the east and west of the well, produced no related material, leaving the well's earlier history without physical evidence to anchor it more firmly in time.