Known locally as Tobar Cholmcille, it is not a constructed well at all, but a natural pothole in the rock, the kind of shallow basin that the sea fills and empties on its own schedule. The dedication to Colmcille, the sixth-century monk and scholar venerated across Ireland and Scotland, is one of hundreds of such attributions along the western seaboard, where his name attached itself to springs, rocks, and shoreline features over many centuries of local devotion.

What makes this particular site quietly odd is a detail recorded by the writer and folklorist Seán Mac Giollarnáth in 1941. The well, he noted, used to have a stone lid, and that lid was said to return of its own accord whenever it was thrown into the sea. It is the kind of localised belief that accumulated around sacred water sources throughout Ireland, where the well itself was understood to have agency, to resist interference, and to reassert its own integrity. Whether the lid still exists, or whether the tradition had already faded by the time Mac Giollarnáth was writing, is not recorded. Tim Robinson, whose meticulous mapping of Connemara brought the site to wider attention in 1985, placed it at this location on the foreshore, though the site was not directly inspected at the time of its archaeological documentation.