Yet Toberoran, in the townland of Keenoge, is a holy well, a category of site that in Ireland has accumulated centuries of religious and folk significance, typically marking a spring or water source associated with a local saint or patron. The name itself is the surest indicator of what this place once meant to people: it was considered worth recording on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, annotated plainly as "Toberoran", which preserves the Irish "tobar", meaning well.

By 1980, the site was described as an unenclosed pool of stagnant water on the inner side of the roadside bank, a description that conveys something about how the fortunes of such places can quietly decline. Without a stone surround, a patron day still observed, or a community actively tending it, a holy well can revert to something that looks, to an uninformed eye, like little more than a boggy hollow. Templepatrick church and its associated graveyard lie roughly 900 metres to the north-east, a proximity that is unlikely to be coincidental. Holy wells in Ireland frequently occur in the orbit of early ecclesiastical sites, the two belonging to the same local sacred geography even when separated by fields and lanes.