One observer recorded a sunken well reached by fourteen steps. Another, writing in 1931, described a stone staircase descending twenty steps or so, on the side of a road within the same enclosure. Whether those two accounts describe the same feature is uncertain enough, but the deeper question is whether the structure is a well at all. It may instead be a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly built in early medieval Ireland, often for storage or refuge. The distinction matters, because it would change what the place was for and how people used it.

The settlement it belongs to, known as Calluragh burial ground or An Raingiléis, sits within the enclosure of an early Christian site on a fairly steep slope with wide views in every direction. Curran, whose numbering system places this feature at no. 15 in a local survey, was among the first to note the descending steps in any systematic way. O'Sullivan's 1931 account added the detail of a stone staircase but did not resolve the question of function. J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region brought both accounts together, leaving the identification open. The uncertainty has not been settled since. A feature that has been described, revisited, and written about across nearly a century still lacks a firm answer as to what it actually is.