This is Tobernalt, a holy well that draws visitors throughout the year, and whose adjacent Mass Rock connects it to one of the more sombre chapters in Irish religious history. A Mass Rock is exactly what it sounds like: a flat stone surface used as an improvised altar during the Penal Laws, the period from the late seventeenth century onwards when Catholic worship was effectively banned and priests conducted services outdoors, in secret, often at remote and sheltered locations. Tobernalt's rock sits just 5.5 metres from the well itself, and local tradition holds that it served precisely this purpose.

The well is enclosed within a circular stone setting roughly two metres in diameter, with a wall half a metre thick. Inside, a sandstone cross with a circular head, measuring 43 centimetres tall, is fixed among more modern plaques on the interior walls. Statues and stations of the cross, all of recent date, have been added over time, giving the site a layered quality, older devotion and newer observance sitting alongside each other. A holly tree on higher ground to the north-west is hung with votive offerings and rags, a practice associated with holy wells across Ireland in which petitioners leave a piece of cloth, sometimes called a clootie, as a physical token of a prayer or intention. The stream running north to south beside the well carries its own local belief: despite no recorded cures, it is said locally that its waters have the power to cure blindness.

The most concentrated moment in Tobernalt's calendar comes on Garland Sunday, the last Sunday in July, when the Bishop of Elphin says Mass at the site at six in the morning. The timing echoes the clandestine pre-dawn gatherings of the Penal era, though today the event is a public act of revival rather than concealment. The surrounding area has been landscaped and the well is, by all accounts, well attended throughout the year, not only on that single morning.