Where a holy well once served a medieval tower house, there now stands a pump-house. That modest substitution tells a quiet story about how a site can pass from the sacred to the purely functional without anyone much remarking on it. Toberavalla sits in the flat-bottomed valley of the Aughnabrone stream in County Waterford, roughly forty metres from the stream's western bank, and its name, like so many tobar placenames across Ireland, preserves the memory of a well long after the well itself has been overtaken by later infrastructure.

The well appears on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked in the same position it occupies today, which at least confirms it was a recognised feature of the landscape in the early nineteenth century. Its presumed function was to supply the nearby Coolnamuck tower house, the fortified residence whose bawn, or defensive enclosure wall, stands roughly twenty metres to the northwest. Tower houses were the dominant form of lordly residence in late medieval Ireland, and a reliable water source within or immediately beside the bawn would have been a practical necessity rather than a luxury. Beyond that probable connection to the tower house, the historical record is silent on Toberavalla's origins, its patrons, or any devotional use it may once have had. A small stream still runs northward from the site, which is perhaps the last visible trace of whatever flow the well once produced.