Toberneighey, in the townland of Blackgarden in County Galway, belongs to a category of place that appears on maps and in monument records but resists easy description. The Irish word tobar means a well, and wells of this kind, often called holy wells, have been focal points of local devotion, healing traditions, and seasonal ritual in Ireland for centuries. They were typically associated with a named saint, visited on a particular feast day, and credited with curative properties for specific ailments, sometimes eye complaints, sometimes skin conditions, sometimes general affliction. The suffix in Toberneighey likely preserves a personal name, possibly that of a saint now largely forgotten outside the immediate locality, though the precise etymology is not firmly established.

Such sites occupy a curious middle ground in Irish religious and archaeological history. They predate Christianity in many cases, drawing on a much older reverence for water sources, yet were absorbed into Christian practice and given saintly patronage somewhere in the early medieval period. The rounds or patterns performed at holy wells, circuits walked in a prescribed direction while reciting prayers, survived in some places well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even as the institutional church grew ambivalent about them. Many wells retain the physical traces of this long use: worn stones, the remnants of a small enclosure, rags or scraps of cloth tied to nearby vegetation as votive offerings. Whether any of these features survive at Toberneighey is not currently documented in available records, which means the site remains, for now, a name attached to a location rather than a fully described monument.