The structure is roughly four metres across, with surviving fragments of outer wall-facing standing to about 0.9 metres in places, and the working theory is that it served as a penitential station, one of those small, often circular enclosures where pilgrims would perform rounds of prayer and penance as part of a pattern, the traditional Irish devotional gathering centred on a sacred well or other holy site. What makes Ballykilladea quietly puzzling is that there may once have been two of them.

When the antiquary J. Fahey visited the area in the late nineteenth century, he recorded two similar enclosures positioned within a few yards on either side of the holy well. Both were dry, meaning they held no water and were therefore distinct from the well itself, and both had become overgrown with hazel and underwood. When the site was inspected again in September 1982, only one of the two could be located, to the east of the well. The second had left no visible trace at ground level. Whether it was dismantled, robbed for building stone, or simply consumed by vegetation and time is not recorded. What remains of the first is itself a ruin, its circular wall collapsed and only intermittently legible in the landscape.