Today, Tobar Bríde sits quietly at the north-western corner of a sluice reservoir, a small spring and shallow pool that most people pass without recognising it for what it once was. By the time the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair visited and recorded it in 1960, even its name had been forgotten locally. He described it simply as a rapid spring issuing from the foot of a high bank, noted by people only in the vaguest terms as a place where something religious used to happen.

What lends the well its particular character is a legend attached to a specific year. According to a note in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for the Dingle area, in 1834 someone washed clothes in the spring, and the water dried up for twenty-four hours in response. The story belongs to a recognisable pattern in Irish folk tradition, where holy wells were understood to be sentient in some sense, capable of withdrawing their favour if treated with disrespect or put to mundane use. The fact that the offence was laundry rather than something more dramatic makes the legend feel all the more grounded and local. Whether the well recovered its full reputation after that episode is not recorded. What is clear is that, by the mid-twentieth century, the rounds had long since ceased and the name Tobar Bríde had slipped out of everyday knowledge, leaving only the physical spring and the old note in the Name Books to mark what had once been a site of active devotion.