There are no formal walls, no tidy enclosure of dressed masonry. What marks this out as something more than a field spring is the landscape surrounding it: low banks and a shallow fosse, the ditch-like depression that typically defines an early ecclesiastical or ceremonial enclosure, trace a trapezoidal shape roughly twenty metres from north to south. Mounds and trenches nearby suggest the buried remains of a building, and possibly a graveyard.

The well was already well regarded by the mid-seventeenth century. A terrier accompanying the 1655 Down Survey map of Farbill Barony noted that near the old chapel at Corbetstown, then called Killpatrick's Church, there lay a well called Killpatrick Well, held 'in great repute among the Irish Inhabitants'. Local tradition knew the whole area as Scarden or Scártán, a name the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan recorded in his field letters as referring to a small brake, or thicket, where St Patrick was said to have rested on his way to the monastery at Clonard. That association gave the well its enduring significance. By 1938, when accounts were gathered for the Irish Folklore Schools' Collection, the pattern day, a communal devotional gathering held annually around the fifteenth of August, was already described as a thing of former times, though people still visited, said prayers and rosaries, and left pieces of cloth tied near the water. Such cloth offerings are a long-standing practice at Irish holy wells, where the cloth is thought to carry away illness or mark a petition made to the saint. Cures were still being reported at the well at that time.

The site sits in undulating pasture and, from aerial photography, is largely obscured by trees and scrub growing within the enclosure. The well itself, a spring rising from the hillside to the south and flowing northwards, is modest and easy to overlook. The tombstone shelter, the enclosing bank, and the faint earthworks nearby are the details that repay a careful look.