That uncertainty is itself part of what makes this place quietly compelling. The hermitage attributed to St Rioc has no confirmed site, no excavated remains, no marker. It exists somewhere within a cluster of early Christian features, a church, a graveyard, and a holy well, but which patch of ground he actually occupied has been lost to time.

The tradition, recorded by O'Carroll in 1974, holds that Rioc, whose name also appears as Rioch or Rock, settled here as a hermit and that the community of followers who gathered around him went on to establish a church at the location. This pattern of a solitary holy man attracting disciples who then formalise his settlement into a place of worship is a well-documented feature of early Irish Christianity, where individual ascetics often became the nuclei of lasting ecclesiastical sites. The church, graveyard, and holy well at Jamesgreen all survive in some form, suggesting that whatever Rioc began here had lasting consequences, even if the hermitage itself, likely a simple cell or enclosure of the most perishable materials, left nothing identifiable behind.