The hollow in the bedrock measures roughly 0.8 metres east to west, 0.2 metres north to south, and no more than 0.2 metres deep, and it is only partly visible even when you are standing directly over it. What makes it quietly compelling is the layering of identities it carries: it appears as St Patrick's Well on Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and 1920, yet Robinson's 1977 map gives it the Irish name Bullán Phádraic, and it has also been formally classified as a bullaun stone, a type of cup-shaped depression ground into rock, often associated with early Christian sites and sometimes believed to hold curative water. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1902, concluded that it was essentially a bullaun that had been adopted into the tradition of the holy well, the two categories quietly collapsing into one another here.

The townland name itself carries a darker suggestion. Poulnalour may derive from the Irish Poll na Lobhar, meaning Leper's Pool or Leper's Hole, and there appears to have been a local belief that the water here could cure leprosy. Two smaller hollows sit in the rock on either side of the main well, their purpose unrecorded. To the east, a large ash tree stands within an oval enclosure bounded by a drystone wall, and a National Folklore Collection record from the 1930s describes a blessed tree at this location, quite possibly the same one still growing there. When an inspection was carried out in 1999, votive offerings were present at the well: money, fragments of glass, a candle, and a statue of Mary, the quiet, accumulated evidence of a tradition that had not died out.