It looks like nothing more than a slight depression in the mountain surface, the kind of thing erosion or settling rock might produce over centuries. It is marked on Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and again in 1920 simply as Leaba Patrick, meaning the bed of Patrick, and that name carries an enormous weight of devotion behind it.

According to Tírechán, who wrote a life of St Patrick in the late seventh century, the saint spent forty days and forty nights on the summit of Croagh Patrick in an act of Lenten fasting and prayer. The tradition that the hollow marks the very spot where Patrick rested during that ordeal took firm hold in folk memory over the following centuries. By the time the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled in 1838, the site was described as being of small dimensions and resembling a dried-up well, a phrase which suggests that some kind of structural feature was still faintly visible at that point, though what it actually was remains uncertain. It may have been an early oratory, a small enclosure associated with penitential practice, or something else entirely that has since dissolved almost completely back into the hillside.

By 1838 it had already been absorbed into the formal pilgrimage round of the summit. At that station, a pilgrim would kneel and recite seven Pater Nosters, seven Hail Marys, and one Creed, then walk seven times around the hollow in a circuit of prayer. That prescribed pattern of movement, the repeated circumambulation of a sacred spot, is a form found at many Irish pilgrimage sites and holy wells, and its presence here suggests the place had long since crossed from landscape feature into liturgical object. Whether the hollow was ever anything more than natural ground, or once sheltered walls and a roof, is a question the mountain has not yet answered.