That uncertainty is rather the point. Recorded by the Ordnance Survey and sitting roughly eight metres north-west of an early Christian oratory, it carries only what one source describes as a "vague tradition" of once being considered holy. No saint's name is attached to it, no pattern day survives in local memory, no votive offerings have been noted nearby. It is a place that has almost, but not quite, forgotten what it was.

Inishvickillane lies seven miles south-west of Slea Head and about nine miles from Dunquin pier on the Dingle Peninsula, the nearest point from which the island can be reached. The island covers 199 acres and has been inhabited, at least seasonally, since early Christian times. The monastic settlement at its south-eastern end includes the oratory beside which this depression sits, part of a cluster of features on the eastern slopes of a rocky bluff that rises sharply above the rest of the island. The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair noted the tradition of holiness associated with the well in 1960, drawing on material that was already faint by then. Whether it ever formed part of the monastic community's devotional life, or belonged to an older, less documented practice, is not recorded.