The Ordnance Survey calls it Askive Lough; locally it has long been known as Hollywood Lake, or sometimes Anne's Lake. Nearby, closed in and largely forgotten, lies a holy well once called St Anne's well or Hollywood well. The two sites are bound together by a pattern, a traditional gathering of pilgrimage and prayer, that was held each year on 8th July, beginning on the preceding evening. The day itself was known simply as 'the morning of the lake'.

The pattern's rituals were specific and layered. Pilgrims made three circuits of the lake while reciting prayers, starting and finishing at a holly tree whose shape was said to resemble a woman. They pressed pins and coins into the trunk, tied rags to the branches, and carried home water from the lake. The water was reputed to have particular power in curing sores, and according to the writer Graves, people travelled considerable distances to obtain it. There is, however, some disagreement in local memory about the precise focus of the devotion: at least one informant recorded by Breandán Ó Cíobháin maintained that the pattern took place at the well rather than at the lake. The figure of St Anne is drawn into penal-era legend at this site, associated with a nearby mass-rock called Com an Aifrinn and with stories of her drowning at the hands of Redcoats who were hunting a local priest. Several versions of that story circulate. The scholar Lyne has suggested that the veneration of St Anne here may reach back further still, to a pre-Christian association with the goddess Áine, and that the Hollywood pattern may originally have been a Lughnasa festival, the harvest celebration that falls at the beginning of August. Curiously, the lake also shares with Loch Mackeenlaun at Kilmakilloge, on the far side of Kenmare Bay, a folk tradition of floating islands; both lakes were the site of patterns held on the same date, and people from the Sneem district are recorded as crossing the bay to attend the Kilmakilloge gathering as well.