The well, known locally as Tobar Naomh Phádraig, Saint Patrick's Well, is a natural spring, and the quarrying activity at some point disturbed it directly. What happened next, according to local tradition, is the kind of story that tends to circulate around such places and persist precisely because it resists easy dismissal: the man responsible fell and broke his leg, and then, on the same day the following year, fell and broke it again.

Holy wells in Ireland occupy a particular kind of sacred geography, typically associated with a patron saint and visited for healing, prayer, or the marking of a feast day. Tobar Naomh Phádraig carries the name of Ireland's most widely invoked saint, and its status as a protected or at least morally consequential site clearly survived into living memory, given the precision of the story attached to it. The detail of the repeated injury on the same calendar day is a recognisable motif in folklore concerning the desecration of sacred sites, though that familiarity does not necessarily make it less striking when it attaches itself to a specific man, a specific action, and a specific spring. The account was collected by T. Robinson, likely the writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, whose meticulous documentation of Connemara's landscape and place lore makes him a credible source for exactly this kind of local knowledge.