Positioned below the high water mark on the foreshore, it is technically submerged or at least inaccessible for much of any given tide cycle, which places it in an unusual category even among Ireland's many thousands of holy wells, sites typically associated with freshwater springs, woodland clearings, or the sheltered margins of fields.

The well is known locally as Tobar Cholmcille, meaning the well of Colmcille, the sixth-century monk and scholar who founded the monastery on Iona and whose name is attached to sacred sites scattered across Ireland and Scotland. Unlike the stone-lined or kerbed wells more commonly associated with patterns and pilgrimage, this one is a natural pothole in the rock of the foreshore, its holy status rooted not in any constructed feature but in the landscape itself. The detail about its form comes from the cartographer and writer Tim Robinson, whose painstaking fieldwork across Connemara and the Aran Islands documented exactly this kind of local knowledge that rarely makes it into formal records.