The drying up of a holy well is not unusual across Ireland, where such sites, typically natural springs venerated over centuries for their healing or spiritual properties, have been subject to drainage works, land improvement, and shifting water tables. What makes this particular spot quietly arresting is the persistence of its name, and what that name suggests.

The well appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1838 and 1922 under the form Toberara, a version of the Irish Tober a Righ, meaning the well of the king. The 1838 OS Letters, a series of detailed field observations compiled by surveyors and their local informants as part of the great nineteenth-century mapping project, record the fuller Irish form alongside the anglicised one. Whether the kingly reference points to an early medieval ruler, a forgotten patron saint whose epithet included rí, or some older layer of local legend is not recorded. The three large stones that once lined one side of the well have since been removed or displaced, leaving only the concrete enclosure and a dry hollow in the pasture beside a field drain.