It is an easy thing to walk past, particularly on rough ground thick with gorse and heather. But the well, known in Irish as Tobar a' Luibín, sits on a slope facing the beach called Trá Bhán, the white strand, and for generations the people who came here were not passing through; they were seeking something specific.

Holy wells are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, typically associated with a patron saint and visited on a particular feast day as part of a pattern, a ritual circuit of prayer around the well and any associated stones or stations. Tobar a' Luibín does not appear to have left a strong record of elaborate ceremony, but by the 1930s it was still recalled locally that people with sore eyes would come to the well, say prayers, and bathe their eyes in the water. Those suffering from other pains and illnesses visited as well. The curative reputation of such wells was often highly specific, with particular springs credited with healing particular ailments, and the combination of prayer and physical contact with the water was understood as inseparable. The well's name, Tobar a' Luibín, translates roughly as the well of the little herb or little bend, a small linguistic detail that hints at a longer relationship between the site and the plants or topography around it, though the precise origin of the name is not recorded.

The well sits close enough to the shore that its water flows southwest towards the sea, a detail that gives it a certain coherence with the landscape around it. Hare Island is a small inhabited island, and the beach at Trá Bhán would have been familiar ground to anyone making their way here. The hollow that collects the spring water is modest in scale and entirely unenclosed, which means that in practice the well is easy to miss unless you know where to look along the field boundary on that southwest-facing slope.