A natural spring sitting in a graveyard, fourteen metres south of a ruined church, with a holy tree marking its edge, is not the kind of place that announces itself. Toberara Well in Tyrrellstown occupies a hollow roughly ten metres across and just over a metre and a half deep, ringed by a loosely built dry-stone wall. It is the sort of site that rewards a slow look rather than a quick one.

The well was once the focus of a pattern, the distinctly Irish tradition of communal prayer and ritual gathering at a sacred site, typically held on a saint's feast day and often involving circumambulation of the well, prayers, and sometimes music and socialising afterward. At Toberara, the pattern fell on the 24th of June, St John's Day, one of the older fixed points in the Irish devotional calendar, with roots reaching back well before Christianity into midsummer observance. A holy tree, the kind of lone thorn or ash that in Irish folk tradition was understood to belong to the well and left untouched as a matter of deep custom, still stands at the south-western edge. Its presence alongside the dry-stone enclosure, the ruined church just to the north, and the graveyard surrounding them all gives the site a layered quality, each element from a slightly different moment in the long use of this particular patch of ground.