Not ruined, not open to the sky, not marked by a statue or a rag tree, just gone beneath a thick tangle of brambles and gorse, fenced off by post and wire, swallowed by the ordinary vegetation of a wet Mayo field. The only way to know anything about what lies underneath is to probe through the overgrowth, which suggests a stone-walled enclosure, possibly circular, roughly 1.8 metres across and 1.2 metres deep. Holy wells in Ireland are typically modest structures of this kind, a lined shaft or basin, sometimes with a surrounding wall, traditionally associated with local saints or healing cures and visited on pattern days. This one offers none of those visible signs of devotion. It is simply there, invisible.

The well has been mapped under the name Tobercoghlan since at least 1838, when it appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that year, and again on the revised edition of 1919. The name itself carries meaning: "tobar" is the Irish word for a well or spring, and the second element likely refers to Lough Coughlan, the lake whose shore lies roughly 70 metres to the north-east. The well sits in low ground between that lake and a canalised stream just five metres to the north, a quietly waterlogged corner of the landscape. To the south-west, an esker ridge, the kind of long gravel and sand mound deposited by glacial meltwater, overlooks the site, though the ridge has been partly quarried away. The combination of mapped name, consistent location across two centuries of surveying, and probable stone lining suggests this is not a recent or casual feature, but one that was once known and visited, and has since been left to the land.