Around it, layers of 19th-century inscriptions and graffiti crowd the same stone surfaces, creating an accidental archive of folk devotion where the very old and the merely old are pressed together without much ceremony.

A holy well is typically a natural spring or water source associated with a saint and used for prayer, offerings, and pattern days, the periodic gatherings of local communities for ritual and celebration. Toberpatrick follows that tradition, dedicated to Saint Patrick, and its enclosing structure has accumulated carved marks across many years. The moon-faced human figure is the most singular of these, and its origins may lie elsewhere on the same site. According to Coffey, writing in 1995, the carving was not always part of the well at all but originally belonged to the leacht cuimhne, a type of commemorative stone monument, erected in memory of the Comyn family and located roughly thirty metres to the north-north-west. A leacht, in its simplest form, is a low cairn or inscribed slab used as a memorial, often found in association with early ecclesiastical sites. How or when the stone migrated from the memorial to the well enclosure is not recorded, but the displacement gives the carving an additional layer of dislocation; a face intended to mark one kind of remembrance now sits within a structure dedicated to another.