What makes this site quietly odd is the architecture that contains them: a roughly E-shaped rectangular structure, about three and a half metres long and a metre and a quarter high, with the wells nestled into the arms of that unusual plan. One well is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the other to St Fechín. Modern offerings left at the site suggest it remains a living place of veneration, not merely an archaeological curiosity.

The Fechín in question is St Fechín of Cong, a seventh-century Irish monastic founder whose name and influence spread well beyond his principal foundation in the west of Ireland. Local tradition holds that the wells were once home to a stone idol believed to have power over the weather, and that it was Fechín himself who eventually smashed it to pieces, a neat parable of Christian authority supplanting older practice. Further strangeness is recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a series of nineteenth-century field observations compiled by scholars travelling Ireland on behalf of the survey. O'Flanagan's volume, published in 1927, noted a flagstone near St Fechín's well known as Leac Fechín, described as the stone by which men were put to the ordeal. Trial by ordeal, in which a physical test was used to determine guilt or innocence, was known across medieval Europe and Ireland, and the association of such a stone with a saint's well suggests the site once carried considerable local legal or ritual authority. No trace of the Leac Fechín had been found when the site was last examined in detail, though its existence was also noted by Hardiman as far back as 1846.