The use of Gothic lettering by OS cartographers was a deliberate convention, reserved for features considered to be of antiquarian or traditional significance, most often holy wells, ancient monuments, or sites with roots in Gaelic custom. That typographical choice is, in this case, almost the entirety of what survives.

Holy wells, known in Irish as tobar, were freshwater springs or pools venerated across Ireland for centuries, typically associated with a local saint or with curative properties attributed to the water. The word luibe is an Irish term meaning herb or plant, suggesting the well may once have been associated with medicinal or ritual use of vegetation, though this is speculative territory. By the time the Ordnance Survey teams were moving through the Irish midlands in the 1830s, many such sites were already fading from active use, remembered in place names and oral tradition more than in regular practice. The surveyors nonetheless recorded them, and their maps have since become one of the primary ways these sites can be traced at all. Whether Tober Luibe was a functioning well, a spring that had already dried or been forgotten, or something only dimly remembered by local informants, the map alone cannot say.