The well at Ballyraheen is a piped spring set on the edge of a natural platform along the slope of a stream valley, a modest and unassuming thing in the landscape, yet it belongs to a category of site that once occupied a central place in Irish rural life.

Holy wells throughout Ireland were frequently the focus of patterns, the word being an anglicisation of the Irish "pátrún", meaning patron saint's day. A pattern was a gathering that combined religious devotion with socialising, rounds of prayer performed at the well alongside music, dancing, and trading. Liam Price, writing in 1958, records that Ballyraheen was formerly the location of one such pattern, and that the well carried a reputation for curing headaches. Beyond that, local tradition appears to have gone quiet. No stories seem to have survived about the saint associated with it, or the precise customs once observed there, which is itself unusual; most wells of this kind retain at least a fragment of legend or a name connecting them to an early Christian figure. At Ballyraheen, even that thread has been lost.