The well sits at the southern end of a neat, path-lined plot on the western side of a byroad near Loch na Leannach, a sea inlet on the Connemara coast. Known locally as Tobar Muire, Mary's Well, it has the character of a place that has accumulated devotion quietly and incrementally: a rock outcrop at the water's edge forms a rough natural shelf, altar-like in shape, and a modest amount of concrete has been worked around the pothole over the years, steadying what nature provided without overwhelming it.

The statue overhead was erected in 1944, but the well's significance runs considerably further back. Writing in 1941, the Connemara historian and folklore collector Seán Mac Giollarnáth recorded a local legend connecting the site to a vision of the Virgin during the Famine years of the 1840s, when apparitions and miraculous associations attached themselves to certain springs and remote places with particular frequency. The tradition of the holy well, a pre-Christian practice absorbed and reframed by Irish Christianity, typically centres on a natural water source believed to have curative or spiritually significant properties, and Tobar Muire fits that pattern closely: the natural spring, the sheltering rock, the gradual layering of devotional objects across generations. The geographer Tim Robinson also noted the site in his 1985 survey of the Connemara landscape, placing it within a broader web of named places and local memory along this stretch of the coast.