The well, known locally as St Gad's Well, is a circular shaft roughly 1.8 to 2 metres in diameter, sunk directly through the body of a prehistoric cairn, the kind of stone mound typically raised over a burial or as a landscape marker in the Bronze Age or earlier. That act of excavation did not destroy the cairn so much as repurpose it: the hollowed interior became an enclosure, with the well positioned on its western side and the remains of a small church occupying the same sheltered space.

The layering here is what makes the site quietly arresting. A cairn, itself ancient when early Christian communities began adapting the Irish landscape, was opened up and given a new devotional life. The church within the enclosure places this within a pattern familiar across Ireland, where early medieval religious foundations were deliberately sited at or near prehistoric monuments, perhaps to absorb their significance, perhaps simply because a prominent hilltop already drew people. The dedication to St Gad is less easily explained; the saint is obscure, and the name does not appear frequently in the broader hagiographical record, which gives the site a slightly solitary character, a place shaped by local memory more than by any major ecclesiastical tradition.