The tree is not merely a curiosity; it is treated locally as a holy well, one where a pool of water collects inside the trunk and is believed to cure warts. That the "well" happens to live inside a tree rather than in the ground is unusual enough, but the story behind it adds another layer of strangeness: the power of this well is said to have transferred here from a different tree nearby, after that first tree died.

The site sits on a slight rise to the north of a children's burial ground, a proximity that would have carried real weight in the Irish devotional landscape, where such liminal spaces were often associated with older, pre-Christian sacred practice. Cartographic evidence reflects the uncertainty about what, exactly, this place is. The 1917 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels it a Holy Well; by the 1947 revision, it had been renamed Bile. That word, bile, denotes a large ancient tree held in veneration, a category recognised in early Irish tradition as a place of assembly, inauguration, or sanctity. The scholar P.W. Joyce noted the term in 1923. The ash tree at Lecarrow fits squarely into that older category, even as local practice continues to treat it through the more familiar frame of a holy well with curative properties.