It is classified as a holy well, a category that in Ireland usually conjures rags tied to thorn bushes, rounds walked at midsummer, and the low murmur of prayer. This one has none of that. Overgrown and structurally bare, it sits at the valley bottom, largely forgotten.

Holy wells occupy a curious place in Irish religious and archaeological life. Many began as pre-Christian sacred sites, absorbed into local Catholic devotion and maintained for centuries through patterns, which were communal gatherings involving ritual circuits of a site, offerings, and prayer. The survival of such traditions depended on community memory and continued use. The well at Ballinglanna appears to have lost whatever devotional life it once had. No structure was ever built around it, or none that survives in any traceable form, and the spring now does little more than feed the stream beside it. It has slipped from sacred geography into ordinary ground.