The well is called Tobar a Chinn, meaning the Well of the Head, and even those who recorded it in the nineteenth century admitted they had no idea why.

The name appears on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, rendered in its anglicised form as Toberakin, and it was still marked the same way on the 1948 revision. Holy wells in Ireland were typically sites of pattern days and devotional practice, often associated with a particular saint or with cures for specific ailments, and many carry names that reflect those traditions. This one apparently does not. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839, a remarkable series of field notes compiled by surveyors as they mapped the country, recorded that the well was no longer frequented for any devotional purpose, and offered no folk explanation for the reference to a head. The local historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905 in his history of the diocese of Ossory, noted the same details without shedding any further light on the matter. Whether the name once pointed to a relic, a burial, a local legend, or something older entirely, it had already passed out of living memory by the time anyone thought to write it down.