The hollow itself is a bullaun, a term for these naturally or artificially formed cup-shaped depressions in rock that appear at sacred sites across Ireland, often associated with healing or ritual use. What makes this particular site quietly telling is not just the shrine but the six small cairns, each roughly half a metre high, arranged on nearby boulders. Cairns of this kind at holy wells are generally understood as penitential stations, waypoints in a pattern of prayer and circumambulation. There used to be more of them.

The well is known locally by two Irish-language names: Tobar na gCreigeán and An Tobar Beannaithe, the latter translating simply as the Blessed Well. According to information gathered by the cartographer and writer Tim Robinson, a priest destroyed several of the cairns at some point within living or recent memory, a generation or two before the early 1990s. It is not recorded why. The removal of penitential stations by clergy was not unheard of in twentieth-century Ireland, sometimes reflecting unease about practices that sat at the edge of official Catholic observance, folk devotion that had its own calendar and logic independent of the parish. The six that remain suggest the site was once more extensively marked out for ritual use.