Yet this is Tober Patrick, a holy well that has been named and mapped consistently since at least 1838, when it appeared on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of the area, and again on the revised edition of 1922. The name "tober" derives from the Irish tobar, simply meaning well, and holy wells dedicated to Saint Patrick are scattered across Ireland, typically marking sites of veneration that predate any formal cartographic record. This one sits in a natural depression of rush-grown ground, sheltered to the north-east and south-west by a rising ridge, fed by a natural spring that sends an overflow westward, flooding the surrounding ground for some twenty-five to thirty metres beyond the pool itself.

What makes the setting quietly remarkable is not the well alone but its immediate neighbourhood. Directly to the south lies a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, the residue of a method involving water-filled troughs heated with burning stones. These monuments are generally associated with the Bronze Age, and they appear throughout the Irish landscape in exactly the kind of low, wet ground that surrounds this well. Roughly 120 metres to the west-south-west, a rath, a circular earthen enclosure of early medieval date used as a farmstead or place of status, crowns a nearby hillock. The clustering of a holy well, a prehistoric cooking site, and an early medieval enclosure within a short distance of one another is the kind of layered, accidental archaeology that accumulates over millennia in a single unremarkable-looking hollow.