According to the tradition attached to the site, a non-believer who came to the well heard the bells of Dunmore church sounding from within it, and that was enough. The well goes by two names, Bellwell and Tobernaclog, and both point toward the same legend; "tobernaclog" combines the Irish words for well and bell.

The physical structure is modest but well made. The spring is enclosed within a square drystone-built surround, roughly 1.6 metres in both length and width, open to the south. Drystone construction uses no mortar; the stones are carefully fitted together and held by their own weight, a technique found across the Irish landscape in everything from field walls to ancient monuments. The well sits close to a stream in low-lying, poorly drained ground, the kind of waterlogged terrain that has always gathered associations with boundary, liminality, and the presence of something other than the ordinary. Holy wells in Ireland were typically venerated long before Christianity formalised the practice, and a spring that speaks, or seems to, fits neatly into that older habit of listening to water.