It is roughly a metre square and a metre high, and it is almost certainly the remnant of something far more eccentric: an eighteen-to-twenty-foot tapering obelisk, built around 1870 by a local man named Sheehan, described in the sources as an eccentric, specifically to shelter pilgrims from bad weather at the holy well nearby. Several crosses were worked into its masonry, and it was once topped with an iron cross. At its base there was an arched chamber, and a smaller adjacent structure held a little wooden case containing statues. The well itself is no longer in holy use, and the water simply runs off to the north-east through scrub. What remains of that peculiar pilgrim shelter is easy to miss.

The well had accumulated several identities long before Sheehan's obelisk appeared. The Ordnance Survey Field Book of 1840 recorded it variously as Tober na scruinahur, St Dominick's well, or possibly the well of the priest, suggesting that even then its dedication was uncertain. Writing in 1912, a researcher named Byrne proposed the name Cronee, suggesting it was probably dedicated to a virgin of that name listed in the Martyrology of Tallaght, an early medieval Irish martyrological text. A century and a half earlier, in 1750, Charles Smith described a fine spring bubbling from a limestone rock with an old tree above it, its boughs hung with an infinite number of rags of all colours. The practice of tying rags or cloth to trees beside holy wells, sometimes called clootie trees, was widespread across Ireland and Celtic Britain, the cloth left as a votive offering or in hope of a cure. By 1897, the writer Windele was calling the well famous and recording its particular local legend: that anyone who drank from it would ever after have a longing desire to return to Glanworth.