The opening is modest almost to the point of being easy to miss, yet it sits at the centre of a devotional landscape that once drew pilgrims across a river, up two separate slopes, and back again, each stage of the journey tied to a specific act or sacred feature of the ravine.

The well goes by two names that point to some ambiguity in its origins. Ordnance Survey maps record it as St. Ernan's Well, but local tradition has long associated it with St. Farannan, a hermit saint said to have lived here. About twelve metres south of the well, a natural rocky shelf in the same ledge was known as the Saint's Bed, the place where, according to tradition recorded by O'Rorke in 1889, Farannan slept. The pattern, meaning the traditional annual pilgrimage to a holy well, usually held on the feast day of the associated saint, took place here on Garland Sunday, the last Sunday in July. Pilgrims began at a rock outcrop by the river on the east side of the ravine, which served as an altar, then crossed the water and climbed the west slope to the well. On the return crossing they paused at a natural pool in the river, called Dabhach Fharannain, which itself carried the status of a holy well. From there they continued up to the east ridge, where they deposited a stone carried from the pool onto a cairn known as the Saint's Grave.

The rough path from the river still follows the contour of the natural ledge up to the well, and the wider sequence of sites, the altar rock, the pool, the cairn on the far ridge, remains largely as the landscape made it. The whole circuit is less a constructed monument than a devotional reading of an already dramatic piece of ground.