The name of the townland itself is the most telling detail: Toberpatrick derives from the Irish tobar Phádraig, meaning the well of Patrick, and the place has been defined by this association long enough that the well gave its name to the land around it rather than the other way around.

The well's origin story follows a pattern common to Patrician sites across Ireland. It is traditionally said to have been created by St. Patrick during a journey through Tireragh, the ancient territory occupying the northwestern finger of County Sligo between Killala Bay and the Atlantic coast. Such foundation legends, in which a saint strikes the earth or blesses a spring as he travels, served to weave a sacred geography across the Irish landscape, linking local water sources to the authority and sanctity of early Christian figures. The well was documented in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1836, a remarkable series of notebooks compiled by John O'Donovan and others as they gathered local historical and linguistic information during the first systematic mapping of Ireland, and it appears on all editions of the OS six-inch map. An Irish Tourist Association survey conducted between 1942 and 1944 recorded it again, by which point the concrete well house that now encloses it was presumably already in place, trading the open spring for something rather more utilitarian.