Its correct Irish name is Tobar Uarán, meaning something close to "cold spring" or "fresh spring," a name that speaks to what it once offered rather than what it now provides. Holy wells were, and in many places remain, sites of local veneration, often associated with a particular saint or with healing properties attributed to the water itself. This one, whatever devotional life it once sustained, had been reduced to an overgrown hollow on a verge.

The well was documented in Paul Gosling's Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, Vol. I, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1993. By that point it was already heavily overgrown and the spring had ceased to flow, at least at the time of the visit. The Toberoran Stream running immediately to its west likely shares its etymology, the stream name preserving the same root as the well name, which is a common pattern in Connacht townlands where water sources shaped both the landscape and the local placename tradition. What the well looked like before it fell into this state, and whether any pattern day or local custom was ever attached to it, is not recorded.