There are no stone surrounds, no carved basin, no votive architecture of any kind. Just water, a scattering of small stones across the shallow floor of the pool, and a name that carries rather more weight than the landscape immediately suggests. The Irish tobar means well, and the second element was translated in 1908 by a scholar named Power as relating to a hag or a nun, giving the full reading as something like "The Hag's Well" or "The Nun's Well", two figures who often overlap in the folklore surrounding ancient water sources in Ireland.

What makes Tobernacally quietly peculiar is the layering of tradition attached to it. Power, writing in 1908, recorded that local belief held a cross to be sometimes visible shining in the water. A separate strand of tradition goes further, claiming that St Patrick's cross is actually buried somewhere beneath or beside the well, an object of considerable sacred significance that has never been excavated or located. The well's practical reputation was equally specific: the water was considered a cure for a horse's cough, but the remedy came with a strict condition. The animal had to be brought to the well before sunrise. That kind of temporal precision, the insistence on a particular hour rather than a general visit, is characteristic of holy well traditions across Ireland, where the curative power was often understood to be contingent on ritual timing rather than simply the water itself. The pool measures roughly ten metres by six, and at the time it was recorded the water was only about ten centimetres deep, the small stones on the bottom clearly visible beneath it.