As recently as 1960, a small number of people were still making rounds at the well on Good Friday, walking a prescribed devotional circuit that was split between the well itself and the lios a couple of hundred metres to the south-west. The 1842 Ordnance Survey map marked that lios as a "Penitential Station", which suggests the practice was already old enough by then to be considered worth recording.

The lios in question is a large early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of circular or oval boundary that in Ireland typically marks the limits of an early medieval monastic or religious site. Attached to it is a calluragh, a term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from burial in sanctified ground. The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair documented the site in 1960, noting that the rounds were still being performed, though by very few people. His account preserves the detail that the ritual moved between both places, the lios and the well, suggesting the two were understood as a single sacred complex rather than separate sites. That pairing of a holy well with an adjacent enclosure is a pattern found across Ireland, but here the presence of the children's burial ground adds a particular gravity to what was already a place of prayer and penance.