The official name, Toberhop, is the one that appeared on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, printed in Gothic script in the manner cartographers used to single out features of note. By the time the third edition was produced in 1932, that Gothic lettering had been replaced with plain Roman script, a small typographical demotion that mirrors something of the well's physical decline.

Locally, though, the place has never gone by its mapped name. Tradition holds that a horse drowned in the spring at some point in the past, and so the well has long been known as Tobar na gCapaill, Irish for the well of the horses. It is one of those place-names that carries its own explanation within it, keeping the memory of a single, probably unrecorded incident alive in everyday speech long after any written account has faded. Holy wells, which are natural springs associated with saints or pre-Christian veneration and often visited for curative purposes, are common across the Irish landscape, and Toberhop sits in close company with one: another holy well lies roughly 170 metres to the south-west, alongside a cashel, ringfort, or similar enclosed settlement site. That cluster of features, all within a short distance of one another in open bogland, suggests this corner of North Galway was once a good deal more frequented than it appears today.