That small typographical demotion, from a named place to a parenthetical absence, is often how sacred wells disappear from the landscape entirely, outlasted in the record by the brackets that mark their passing.

Toberboy takes its name from the Irish tobar, meaning well, and buí, meaning yellow, a colour that appears in well names across Ireland and may refer to the hue of the water, the surrounding vegetation, or an older association now lost. The 1839 first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it clearly, sitting in the south-west angle of a field, with Templeboy church positioned immediately to the south. Holy wells and early church sites frequently occur together in the Irish landscape, the sacred geography of one reinforcing the other, and here the pairing appears quite deliberate. By the time the surveyors returned for the 1900 revision and the twenty-five inch map, the well had been reduced to a site of, while the church too had already been recorded under its own monument number as a separate, distinct loss. Exactly where the church stood is itself a matter of some cartographic uncertainty, with the two maps placing it either immediately south or roughly 160 metres to the east-south-east, a discrepancy that speaks to how thoroughly the ground had changed between surveys.