The spot is called Labba Patrick, an anglicisation of the Irish Leaba Phátraig, meaning Patrick's bed. The stone paving and walling visible today are modern additions; beneath or behind them, the original monument was almost certainly just stones or exposed bedrock, the precise form now uncertain. What gives the place its particular character is not any grand architecture but the weight of accumulated devotion attached to something so physically modest.

The site functioned as the opening station of the traditional pattern at Aghagower. A pattern, from the Irish word for patron saint, was a structured ritual of prayers and devotions performed at a sacred site on or around a saint's feast day, typically moving between a sequence of prescribed stops. Labba Patrick was where the Aghagower pattern began. The antiquarian John O'Donovan visited in 1838 while compiling the Ordnance Survey Letters, a series of detailed field notes gathered to support the first large-scale mapping of Ireland. He wrote of finding the bed at the base of an aged ash tree and recorded witnessing an old woman at prayer there: 'I can never forget the enthusiastic glow of devotion to which her eyes gave expression.' The site appears by its current name on both the 1838 and 1929 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, suggesting the name was already well established when O'Donovan arrived and remained in consistent use for at least a century after.

The site sits within the graveyard at Aghagower, a townland with a long ecclesiastical history. The bed itself is a small thing to look at, but O'Donovan's account is a useful reminder that the significance of such places has never depended on scale or spectacle, only on continuity of use and the particular quality of attention people bring to them.