It is a modest, functional thing, erected in 1962, and it marks a place where something older once stood and has since completely vanished.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map edition of 1930 records a feature at this location identified simply as St. Patrick's Shrine. Whatever physical form that earlier shrine took, no trace of it survives above ground. The 1962 installation did not so much preserve as replace it, substituting whatever came before with poured concrete and a familiar devotional statue. Sites associated with St. Patrick are scattered across Ireland in considerable numbers, often tied to local traditions of veneration, pattern days, or the curative properties of nearby water. The presence of a trough here, filled with water from the adjacent stream, suggests the site may once have functioned within that broader tradition of water-associated holy places, though the original character of the shrine at Pollaneyster is now simply unknown.