That word does a lot of work. Holy wells are a fixture of the Irish landscape, typically associated with a patron saint, a pattern day, or a tradition of rounds and ritual offerings. This one carries a name, Tobar Thomáis, Thomas's Well, which suggests some local memory of significance, but the specific devotions or stories that might once have animated the place have largely dissolved.

The folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair noted the tradition in 1960, and the well was later recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986. That survey catalogued the extraordinary density of monuments on this westerly finger of Kerry, where prehistoric field systems, early Christian remains, and ogham stones, upright stones inscribed with an early Irish script running along their edges, survive in unusual concentration. Tobar Thomáis sits quietly within that landscape, a modest construction of water and stone whose religious associations were already becoming uncertain by the time anyone thought to write them down.