The name itself carries the dedication: "Tobar" is the Irish word for well, and "Doney" derives from Domhnach, an early ecclesiastical term associated with Sunday or, more often, with a patron saint whose name has become worn smooth by centuries of use. Holy wells of this type are scattered across Ireland in their thousands, but each occupies its own particular relationship with the land around it, the community that tended it, and the saint, real or legendary, to whom it was once addressed.

Beyond the placename and its location on Ben Beg, the documentary record for this site is presently thin, and it would be a disservice to fill that silence with invention. What can be said is that wells bearing the Toberdoney form of dedication are generally associated with early Christian practice in Ireland, when local cults gathered around natural water sources long considered sacred. The pattern of reverence was often straightforward: a well, a patron's feast day, and a pattern or rounds ceremony in which visitors would pray and walk a prescribed circuit. Many such traditions continued quietly into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even as the institutional church kept a cautious distance from them.