The enclosure is modest enough that you might step over its walls without noticing them, yet beneath the present structure lie the traces of an earlier, roughly circular one, sharing the same south-east-facing entrance. Scattered across several nearby enclosures of similar low drystone construction, the interiors are covered in small stones and pebbles, left by generations of pilgrims completing the rounds of a penitential station, a formal circuit of prayer performed at a sequence of sacred points. About seventy-five metres to the west, a recess in the hillside known as Leaba Phádraig, St Patrick's Bed, sits beside a modern altar.

The spring is called Tobar Phádraig locally, Patrick's Well, and its association with the saint draws the site into a long tradition of Patrick-linked high passes and liminal places across the west of Ireland. What makes the record here unusually specific is a note from 1684, when the Connacht historian Roderic O'Flaherty recorded the well as a remedy for murrain in cattle, the kind of wasting disease that could devastate a farming community. That detail, preserved through James Hardiman's 1846 edition of O'Flaherty's work, anchors a practice that might otherwise seem timeless to a particular moment of documented rural anxiety. The site was frequented then, and it is frequented still.

The last Sunday of July remains the day when the well and its enclosures draw visitors, a date that aligns with the old Lughnasa period, when upland and lakeside gathering places across Ireland were traditionally visited. The approach is the pass itself, a working mountain saddle with the open ground of Connemara falling away to the south. The small stones already piled inside the enclosures are not litter but intention, each one placed there as part of the devotional circuit that has been repeated on this hillside, in one form or another, for at least three centuries of recorded memory.