Not as a mistake, not as a disposal problem, but as an offering, in the hope that their cows would remain productive through the year. Those who could not afford butter of their own would wait nearby until the crowd dispersed, then collect what they could from the surface of the lake. This small, rush-grown hollow in Carrownacross was a site of layered and quietly peculiar ceremony, and the traces of it, physical and documentary, are still there to be read.

The well, likely dedicated to St. Ciaran given the form of its name, appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1838 and 1920, where it is marked as Loughkeeraun Well. On the earlier edition, a lake of roughly fifty metres across is shown at the site, and a Fair Green nearby to the south-east suggests this was a place of public gathering. The scholar John O'Donovan, writing in the OS Letters of 1838, recorded the annual patron day held here on Garland Sunday, known in Irish as Domhnach Chrom Dubh, the last Sunday of July. O'Donovan noted that the day drew its popular name from the wearing of corn garlands, which he connected to older harvest observances. As well as the butter-throwing, people swam their horses in the lake to ward off misfortune, and tied cow-tethers called búaracha around a tree at the site, leaving them there. By the time O'Donovan was writing, the local clergy had already discouraged most of these practices, and they were falling away; the stations on the patron day continued, but the older customs were fading. Three upright structures described as Monuments were also marked to the east of the well on the 1838 map; by 1920 they were listed as a site only, and nothing visible remains of them today. They may have been penitential cairns, the kind of low stone heaps associated with circuits of prayer at holy wells, but their nature is uncertain.

The well itself is now a modest thing: a semi-circular pool of roughly one metre across, edged by a low stone wall that appears relatively recent. The wall is open to the north, where a channel leads out and expands into a second pool a few metres away, with two smaller channels branching further on. A church lies about four hundred metres to the north-east, and a rath, a circular earthwork enclosure typical of early medieval settlement, sits approximately one hundred and seventy metres to the south. The well sits in damp, rushy ground, much as O'Donovan found it.