What makes the spot quietly curious is the gap between what it is and what it is known as: the landowner did not recognise it as a holy well at all, and yet the scholarly record identifies it as St Peter's Well, a named sacred site on the steep eastern slope of the Awbeg River valley in north Cork, tucked into woodland just west of an old tea house.

O'Reilly, writing in 1987, noted that no patterns were ever held at the well. Patterns, in the Irish devotional tradition, were gatherings held on a saint's feast day at a local holy well or sacred site, typically involving prayer, circumambulation, and sometimes festivity. Their absence here suggests the well occupied a quieter place in local religious life, if it was actively venerated at all. The tea house standing nearby carries its own layer of ambiguity: there is a tradition that it was built on the site of a former church, which would give the whole small enclave a longer sacred history than its present appearance suggests.