The official maps name them after Saint Brendan, the sixth-century navigator monk whose legend stretches from the west of Ireland to the Atlantic horizon. But locally, the devotion belongs to a different saint entirely: Saint Columcille, whose feast day draws people to visit these spots rather than any day associated with Brendan. It is a quiet mismatch of cartographic record and living practice, the kind of discrepancy that surfaces often in Irish sacred landscapes.

The site sits just above the high-water mark, where the land meets the sea in that ambiguous tidal zone. The principal well is a small, smooth, rounded pothole worn into a flat rock outcrop, roughly thirty centimetres across. Around its southern side, someone has built a semicircular drystone cairn, a structure of loose dry stone fitted without mortar, about a metre and a half in diameter and the same in height. About a metre to the south-east stands a second structure, D-shaped in plan and slightly taller, referred to simply as the Monument. Coins and the remains of flowers are visible among the stones of both cairns, the residue of recent devotion. A second well, the one that locals specifically call Saint Brendan's Well, lies fifty metres to the west, just below the high-water mark: another natural pothole, this one forty centimetres across, with its own irregular cairn built above it. The site was recorded as a place in memory of Saint Brendan by the Connacht historian Roderic O'Flaherty as early as 1684, suggesting that whatever confusion exists about which saint is being honoured, the sanctity of the place has not shifted in centuries.