Beside it lies a rectangular slab with a broken inscription: SAINT … E PRAY FOR HER THAT ERECTED THIS. The name in the middle is gone. Above the words, two stylised angels flank the text, and the surface beneath them is covered in scored crosses. Nobody, apparently even by the early twentieth century, had any memory of who commissioned the stone or why.

The well is dedicated to St Buonia, known in Irish as Beoanigh, who local tradition holds was a sister of St Patrick, though there are competing claims. Writing in 1893, O'Donoghue suggested the site may instead have been founded by St Brendan or by his disciple St Beoanus. In the Martyrology of Donegal, a figure called Beoin, Virgin, is commemorated on the first of February, and by the time Lynch described the well in 1902 the local belief was firm that Buonia had been a nun, a reading apparently shared by whoever carved a female face on that same memorial slab. The devotional practice Lynch recorded was precise and unhurried: nine rounds of the site, the recitation of the rosary at each circuit, with every round concluding at a priest's grave. Votive offerings, buttons, hairpins, and tassels cut from the woollen shawls then worn by women across Kerry, were threaded through a hole in the end stone of the grave. Lynch noted that this holed stone recalled the holed stones found at the ends of dolmens, prehistoric burial structures, a continuity of use that nobody seemed to remark upon or find strange.

The well is part of a considerably larger complex arranged across two stone-revetted terraces cut into the hillside. A leacht, which is a low commemorative cairn used as a station during penitential circuits, sits alongside an oratory, a gable-shrine, a cross-slab, and a stone cross on the upper terrace. Below it, two circular stone huts and the foundations of two rectangular buildings survive, along with what may be the remains of a formal entrance: two parallel rows of upright slabs, each about 1.2 metres high, standing three metres apart. The site looks westward over St Finan's Bay and towards the Skelligs, the cluster of rock islands whose monastic ruins share something of the same severe, elevated character.