It is a penitential cairn, a type of structure built up over generations by worshippers who added stones as a physical act of prayer or penance, and it belongs to a cluster of sacred features that together suggest this quiet hillside was once a place of considerable religious significance.

The cairn measures roughly 2.5 metres east to west and 4.2 metres north to south, rising to about 0.6 metres at its highest point. It is associated with a pattern, the Irish term for a traditional devotional round in which pilgrims would pray at a sequence of stations, often circling a holy well or a series of marked points in a prescribed order. A second penitential cairn lies just a few metres to the north-east, suggesting the pattern here involved more than one stopping place. Approximately 40 metres to the south sit the remains of an early medieval church and an associated graveyard, which places the well and its cairns within a much older landscape of Christian worship, one that was likely operating in some form from the early medieval period onwards.