The place known as Toberfoolagh, near Fore in County Westmeath, appears on the 1837 six-inch OS map as a named feature, the kind of well that would have carried local religious or folkloric significance. By the time cartographers returned to revise their sheets in 1910, the name had acquired a bracketed qualifier: "Site of". The well itself was gone, filled in or levelled at some point during those intervening decades, leaving only its name on paper as evidence it had ever been there.

Holy wells in Ireland are typically natural springs associated with a patron saint or with older, pre-Christian veneration of water sources. They were places of pattern days, of rounds and prayers, of small offerings left at the water's edge. Toberfoolagh, whatever its particular dedication or local custom, had lost even its physical form by the early twentieth century. When researchers visited in 1985, what they found was described as a low grassy knoll with a hollow in the centre, the faint impression in the ground being the only remaining trace of the well's former presence.

Fore itself is a village with a remarkable concentration of early medieval remains, which makes the quiet erasure of this well all the more pointed. While the surrounding landscape preserves visible ruins and monuments, Toberfoolagh survives only as a topographic ghost, a shallow dip in the grass that most visitors would walk past without a second thought.