That alone sets it apart from the great majority of such sites, which are typically found inland at springs or beside fields. Known locally as Tobar Cholmcille, the well is dedicated to Saint Colmcille, the sixth-century monk associated with Iona and with countless sacred sites across Ireland and Scotland. What makes the place stranger still is that it is routinely confused with an entirely different feature: a tub-sized pothole higher up on the shore that many visitors have taken, wrongly, to be the actual well.

The true well is a small round pothole, located just south of a narrow inlet called Crompán an Mhaide Mhóir, and it is easy to see how the mix-up happens. Both features are natural formations in the rock, shaped by water over time, and neither is marked or enclosed in any obvious way. The detail about the misidentification comes from T. Robinson, whose careful fieldwork on the islands of Connemara and Galway Bay produced some of the most granular landscape documentation of the region. The confusion is a small but telling reminder that the traditions attached to holy wells depend heavily on local knowledge passed between people, and that once that transmission breaks down, even the well itself can be lost in plain sight.