The pools are modest in scale, the larger barely a metre and a half across, and a deliberately placed limestone block separates them. Together they feed a small stream running to the south-west. What makes them notable is the name attached to them on the 1915 Ordnance Survey six-inch map: Tobersheela. A tobar is an Irish holy well, and the sheela element almost certainly connects this site to Sheela-na-Gig, the enigmatic carved female figures found across Ireland and Britain, often associated with churches and places of older, pre-Christian significance. A named well carrying that association, set within the enclosure of a medieval Cistercian abbey, is an unusual thing.

Corcomroe Abbey itself was founded in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and the well sits roughly seventy metres south-east of its main buildings, just inside the line of the enclosing wall. The positioning is telling. Holy wells in Ireland were frequently incorporated into Christian sites rather than displaced by them, their older significance folded into new devotional practice. The pools here are rock-cut, meaning they were shaped from the natural limestone rather than built up, and the separating block between them appears to have been deliberately set rather than naturally occurring. Whether the site was ever a formal focus of pilgrimage or pattern devotion is not recorded, but the care taken in its construction and naming suggests it was more than a casual water source.

At some point the well was fenced off with barbed wire and wooden posts set in concrete, and it has been used as a watering hole for livestock. The preservation order that covers the site acknowledges its importance as a monument, though the fencing gives it an unglamorous appearance on the ground. Visitors to Corcomroe who know to look for it will find it close to the abbey's enclosing wall, a small and easily overlooked pair of shallow pools with a name that carries considerably more weight than their dimensions suggest.