What makes it quietly peculiar is not just what it is but what it was paired with: the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks two wells here, side by side. Only one survives. The other has vanished without obvious trace, leaving its companion to carry whatever significance the site once held, largely unvisited and no longer in active holy use.

The well is dedicated to St Baoithin, and writing in 1934, a scholar named Bowman recorded that rounds were still being paid there on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays throughout the month of May. Paying rounds at a holy well is a form of ritual circumambulation, a prescribed circuit made on foot around the well, often accompanied by prayers, that was once common practice at sacred water sources across Ireland. Bowman noted one specific exception to the weekly pattern: on the 22nd of May, a single visit was considered sufficient. That precision, one day in the month that compresses the whole obligation into a single act, suggests a feast day or particular association with the saint, though the well now lies close to a site identified as an early ecclesiastical enclosure, roughly seventy metres to the north-north-east. The proximity of well to enclosure is typical; early Christian communities in Ireland frequently absorbed older sacred water sources into their religious geography, and the two features at Knockaneda were almost certainly understood as part of the same sacred landscape.