Saint Canice's Well has long been called Kenny's Well by locals, a casual shortening that quietly preserves the memory of the sixth-century saint to whom Kilkenny's great cathedral is also dedicated. The well sits at the foot of a sharply inclined slope, and by the mid-seventeenth century it was substantial enough to have an arched stone structure built over it, with stone benches lining the interior, while the water ran continuously outward into the Breagagh. Archdeacon Lynch, writing around 1670 in his De Praesulibus Hiberniae, described people coming to the well to seek relief from illness, drinking the water and invoking the intercession of Saint Canice, and leaving, as he put it, very frequently restored to perfect health.

The well's institutional history is older still. In the mid-thirteenth century, Geoffry de Tourville, Bishop of Ossory from 1244 to 1250, granted a conduit of water from the well to the nearby Black Abbey, a Dominican friary founded around the same period and still standing today roughly three hundred metres to the north-east. His successor, Hugh of Glendalough, who held the bishopric from 1251 to 1260, went further, transferring the full charge of the well to the same Dominican friars and granting them the field in which it stood. The arrangement placed a site of popular devotion under the formal care of a mendicant order at a moment when the Dominicans were still establishing themselves in Irish towns, and it gave the friars of Black Abbey a direct and practical connection to one of the city's most frequented sacred spots.