That, according to local tradition, was precisely the point. The arch, now in three pieces though originally a single weathered stone, rises only 0.37 metres at its interior height, its two arms embedded into the cairn beneath. The remedy it offered was straightforward: insert your head into the space below, and a headache would be cured.

The site sits within a multiperiod field system at the southern base of a low east-west ridge, in pasture that has been worked and reworked across many centuries. It was recorded on Tim Robinson's map of the Burren as far back as 1977, noted simply as an "arched stone for headache cure," though official records had classified it as a possible fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt stone near a water source. What makes the classification awkward is the site's obvious relationship with the sacred rather than the culinary: the arch faces directly towards St. Colman's well, which lies roughly two metres to the south. Holy wells across Ireland were long associated with healing rituals and patron saints' feast days, and the combination here of a well, a curative stone, and a nearby hut site suggests a cluster of devotional activity that probably developed over a long period. The penitential station designation, implying a place of prayer or physical ritual as part of a spiritual practice, seems to fit the evidence rather better than the burnt-mound theory.

The cairn itself is modest, barely 2.8 metres in diameter and 0.4 metres high, easy to overlook in the rough pasture of the plateau. The arch faces south towards the well, and a hut site lies just four metres beyond that, on the well's far side. An enclosure sits around 94 metres to the east. The landscape here holds a great deal in a small space, and the broken arch at its centre is the kind of object that rewards a slow look.