It is known locally as Tobar Feichín, a holy well dedicated to Saint Feichín, and beside it sits a modest cairn and the remains of a collapsed stone structure that once covered the source. Holy wells of this kind were typically small enclosures built to mark and protect a venerated spring, often associated with a patron saint whose feast day would draw local people for patterns, informal gatherings combining prayer with communal celebration. What is unusual here is the setting: not in a village or beside a church, but near a high mountain pass, where the spring itself feeds the very stream that drains the valley below.

The well was noted as long ago as 1684 by Roderic O'Flaherty, the Galway historian and antiquarian whose observations were later published by James Hardiman in 1846. That O'Flaherty thought it worth recording suggests it already carried some local significance in the seventeenth century, even if the collapsed stonework now gives little outward impression of importance. The cartographer and writer Tim Robinson also contributed information about the site, and his long familiarity with Connemara's landscape lends the reference a particular weight. Robinson spent decades mapping and writing about this part of the west, attentive precisely to the kinds of small, half-forgotten features that formal surveys tend to pass over quickly.