Quartz has a long association with sacred and burial sites across Ireland, its white brightness appearing at passage tombs, on grave goods, and at places considered to stand at the threshold of the ordinary world. Here, the material is used with quiet deliberateness, marking the well's religious character without any elaborate inscription or monument.

Writing in 1923, a scholar named Power noted that forty years previously, meaning roughly the 1880s, "rounds" were quite frequent at the site. Rounds, in Irish devotional practice, refers to the ritual of walking a prescribed circuit around a holy well a set number of times, often barefoot and while reciting prayers, as an act of penance or petition. The practice is ancient, blending pre-Christian veneration of water sources with later Catholic observance, and it once drew people to hundreds of wells across the country on particular feast days. Power's phrasing, "quite frequent," suggests the custom was already in decline by his time of writing, the living tradition having faded sometime in the late nineteenth century. What remains at Ballinbrittig is a well in a grove, the quartz cross still set in its wall, quietly outlasting the gatherings that once gave it its purpose.