The well is known locally as Tobar Cholmcille, dedicated to Saint Colmcille, one of the most venerated figures in early Irish Christianity. What makes this place particularly unusual is not the well itself but everything immediately around it: footprints said to belong to the saint are pointed out in the rock face to the north, and to the south runs a broad band of whitish porphyry, a quartz dyke cutting visibly through the darker stone.

That pale geological seam has a name: Bóthar na Naomh, the Road of the Saints. Local tradition, as recorded by the writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, holds that this is the path taken by saints as they processed outward towards Oileáin Árainn, the Aran Islands. The quartz dyke, a natural intrusion of crystalline rock formed under intense geological pressure millions of years before anyone walked these islands, was read by later generations as a literal saint's road, a line of departure for holy figures heading west across the water. It is a striking example of how early Irish communities mapped their religious landscape onto the physical one, finding in a geological accident a confirmation of sacred movement and presence. The saint's footprints pressed into the scarp face complete the picture: a well, a road, a pair of prints, all gathered into a few metres of exposed rock on a small Atlantic island.