The whole structure is compact, barely a metre across north to south, but the care taken with it is striking. According to the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, that triangular form was intended to represent the hill of Calvary and was either surmounted by a cross at some point or was always meant to be.

The well sits in a shallow valley between two hills, tucked within Killamery graveyard, roughly 13 metres south of a high cross and about 50 metres from the ruins of a medieval church. It is dedicated to St Nicholas, whose feast falls on the 6th of December, a date that coincides with the feast of St Gobán Fionn, the monk credited with founding a monastery on this site in the early 7th century. Whether that shared date reflects a deliberate layering of one devotion onto another, or simply a convenient alignment, is not recorded. The monastic settlement has largely disappeared, but the graveyard still holds several survivals: the high cross, two cross-slabs, a stone cross, and two bullaun stones, which are large stones with one or more cup-shaped depressions worn or carved into them, traditionally associated with early Christian ritual use. The well, with its carefully worked boulder, belongs to the same dense accumulation of early medieval religious material.

The site lies within the graveyard enclosure, and the well is easy to locate relative to the high cross nearby. The feast day on the 6th of December would once have been the occasion for pattern day observances, the local tradition of gathering at a holy well to pray and walk a circuit, though no detail of current practice survives in the record.