The Irish "Tobar an Leasa" translates roughly as "the well of the enclosure" or "the well of the fort", and that word, leas, is one of the old terms for a ringfort, the circular earthen or stone enclosures that once served as farmsteads and homesteads across early medieval Ireland. The well itself, also known as Tobernasool or Tobar na Súl, is gone too, destroyed when a drain was being excavated in the vicinity, some 300 metres from the shoreline.

What makes the site particularly intriguing is what the drainage work inadvertently uncovered. Workers encountered what local accounts described as a cave, though it was never fully explored. This may well have been a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that was commonly associated with ringforts in early medieval Ireland, used for storage, refuge, or both. The connection between the well's name, the possible souterrain, and the suspected ringfort suggests a cluster of related features that once made up a small but coherent settlement in this coastal landscape. J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula recorded the site, drawing together the place-name evidence and local knowledge into a picture of something largely erased but not entirely forgotten.

Very little survives above ground, and the well that once marked the spot is no longer there. What remains is essentially a toponym and an unresolved question about what lies beneath the soil close to the bay.