A midden is essentially a refuse heap, the accumulated domestic or ritual waste of people who gathered in a particular place over time. Finding one beside a holy well shifts the usual image of quiet, pious devotion into something more material and social, a place where people also ate, drank, and discarded the evidence.

The deposit was examined by O'Kelly in 1946, who recorded oyster shells alongside ox, sheep, and pig bones, as well as sherds of glazed pottery typical of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The midden extended westward from the western side of the well. O'Kelly noted that the stratigraphical relationship between the midden and the well, meaning the physical layering that indicates which came first or how the two features relate in time and space, made it plausible that the refuse had been left by pilgrims performing "rounds" at the well. Making rounds was a common devotional practice at Irish holy wells, involving a set number of circuits walked around the site, often accompanied by prayers. That such rounds also involved a meal of oysters and roasted meat, with pottery vessels to hand, gives a considerably more lived-in quality to what is so often described in purely spiritual terms.