It is a modest structure, roughly a metre and a half high and a metre wide, the kind of thing easily passed without a second glance. But holy wells in Ireland were rarely just sources of water. They were sites of pattern days and ritual circuits, places where communities gathered to walk prescribed rounds, pray, and leave offerings, and the fact that this one has fallen out of such use gives it a particular quiet strangeness.

Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman recorded that rounds at the well had been discontinued long since, even by that point. He also noted a piece of local tradition that is harder to account for: that two monks were said to have been hanged near this well. No further detail survives about who those monks were, when the hanging was supposed to have occurred, or what circumstances surrounded it. Tradition of this kind tends to accumulate around places that were already considered significant, and it is possible the well's religious character and the story of the monks became entangled over generations. Whether one explains the other, or whether they are entirely separate threads of local memory, is impossible now to say.