The combination is quietly peculiar: a piece of church furniture, bearing a Latin inscription dated 1821, removed from its original setting and reassembled in the open countryside beside ancient sacred springs. Holy wells in Ireland were venerated long before Christianity and were frequently absorbed into the new faith, with dedications to saints layered over much older patterns of use. Here, that layering is unusually literal.

When the antiquarian W. G. Wood-Martin recorded the site in 1882, he described it as a simple altar shaded by a spreading oak tree, which suggests the arrangement had already acquired a settled, almost domestic quality by that point. The stone itself, measuring roughly 1.35 metres by 1.75 metres, is thought to have originated at the old church on Chapel Street in Sligo town, from which it was at some point relocated to Dromard. The Latin inscription marks 1821 as a significant date in the object's history, though whether that records its making, a rededication, or something else is not recorded. The move from an urban chapel to a rural enclosure shared with two holy wells gives the altar an afterlife quite different from anything its original makers would have anticipated.