The first is a natural round pothole, roughly 30 centimetres across, visible only by peering down into a crevice in the outer face of a rocky outcrop. The second lies immediately to its east, and is said to have a statue-like stone standing on either side of it. That detail, passed on by cartographer and writer Tim Robinson, who documented the landscapes and place-names of Connemara with exceptional care, gives the site an atmosphere that is difficult to account for from a distance.

Holy wells in Ireland are typically freshwater springs or pools associated with a local saint, visited for healing or devotion, often on a saint's feast day in a ritual circuit called a pattern. What makes this pair unusual is not their spiritual character but their position in the intertidal zone, roughly 180 metres north of the small quay known as Céibh an Doirín. Most holy wells occupy elevated or sheltered ground; these sit where land and sea negotiate. The pothole in the rock crevice reads as entirely natural in origin, which is itself unremarkable, since many holy wells began as features of the landscape that were later drawn into devotional use. What accumulated around the eastern well, those flanking stones described as statue-like, is harder to categorise without a direct visit, and the site, as of the early 1990s when it was recorded, had not been formally inspected by any surveyor.