The well is unassuming in scale, but the story attached to it is the kind that belongs distinctly to the early Irish tradition of saints who leave physical traces wherever they pause, as though the landscape itself recorded their passing.

The well is dedicated to St Isleamáin, and the account of how it came to be blessed is a compact piece of hagiographic legend. According to Tim Robinson's 1980 account of the Aran Islands, Isleamáin was sailing past when he came ashore in search of fresh water. When he knelt to drink, or perhaps to pray, the rock yielded to him, and the prints of his knees and hands remained impressed in the ground beside the spring. This kind of story, in which a saint's body leaves a permanent mark on stone or earth, is common across Ireland and early Christian Britain, where it served both to localise a saint's authority and to explain the origin of a sacred site. The well at Ceathrú an Teampaill, the townland name meaning something close to "the quarter of the church", sits within that wider tradition, though the detail of a saint pausing mid-voyage, touching land just long enough to leave his mark, gives this particular account an unusually transient, almost accidental quality.