The structure is prosaic enough, but it almost certainly sits over one of three holy wells that, according to a seventeenth-century account, were said to perform a small collective miracle: their waters ran together and, in doing so, turned a neighbouring mill.

The source for that claim is John Colgan, a Franciscan friar who documented early Irish saints and their associated sites in the seventeenth century. Colgan recorded that three fountains or wells in this area were each dedicated to a different saint, one to St. Aedh, one to St. Brigid, and the third very probably to St. Conran, also rendered as Cuman. He also noted that one of the wells bore the name Tobur na b-fear, meaning the Men's Well, a name that hints at a tradition of gendered or segregated use, not uncommon at early Irish holy wells. The mill pond belonging to a nearby corn mill still lies in the field immediately to the north, which gives the miraculous water-joining story at least a grounding in local geography. Within roughly eighty metres to the west, further traces of this early religious landscape survive: a second holy well dedicated to St. Brigid, a church also bearing her name, and a building that may have been known in the seventeenth century as the Court of St. Brigid. A possible third holy well lies in a field to the south-southwest. The cluster suggests that this corner of Westmeath was once a site of some local devotional significance, organised around figures who have since faded to little more than names in a friar's notes.