It has been recorded as a well and as a souterrain, that second term referring to an underground passage or chamber, typically stone-lined, built during the early medieval period and associated with nearby settlement sites. The ambiguity here is genuine and has persisted across decades of observation.

The feature sits within or immediately beside the enclosure at Calluragh burial ground, known in Irish as An Raingiléis, an early Christian settlement on a fairly steep south-east facing slope of Croaghmarhin, now designated as a National Monument. Two separate observers recorded the same descending staircase and reached different conclusions about its purpose. Curran described it as a sunken well reached by fourteen steps. O'Sullivan, writing in 1931, counted twenty steps or so and placed the stone stairs on the side of the road within the enclosure, but did not commit to an identification either. The Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey by J. Cuppage, published in 1986, noted that the feature could plausibly be a souterrain rather than a well, leaving the question open. The discrepancy in step counts between the two descriptions, fourteen versus twenty, adds a further layer of uncertainty, raising the possibility that the two observers were not even looking at precisely the same thing, or that the feature had changed in the intervening years between their visits.