It is a modest thing, practical and unadorned, yet its position is quietly telling: it sits pressed against the outer wall of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort, known as Cathair Craobh Dearg and referred to locally as 'The City'.

The well as it stands today is a mid-twentieth century replacement. Around 1950, the original holy well, which had stood on the opposite side of the cashel wall to the WSW, was superseded by this newer D-shaped enclosure on the ENE face. Holy wells in Ireland were, and in many places remain, sites of devotional practice, often associated with patron saints and visited on particular feast days for prayers or ritual circuits known as rounds. The move from one side of the ancient wall to the other is the kind of quiet local decision that rarely gets recorded anywhere, and its full reasons are now gone from the record. What remains is the bench set against the inner wall, presumably for those who come to sit awhile, and the spring water still rising in the small basin below.

The cashel itself, Cathair Craobh Dearg, provides the well's most striking context. Cashels, built from dry-stone walling without mortar, are characteristic of the Kerry landscape and many date to the early medieval period. That a functioning well sits tucked against the outside of one, serving what was presumably a community gathered around or within the fort across many centuries, gives the site a layered quality that its plain concrete interior does not immediately advertise.