By 1921, the Ordnance Survey had already conceded as much, updating its mapping to record not the well itself but the "site of" it, that small parenthetical acknowledgement that something once significant had slipped out of the present tense.

Holy wells in Ireland were rarely just water sources. They accumulated layers of devotional practice, often associated with a local saint, and were visited on particular feast days for patterns, the term for the ritual circuits, prayers, and communal gatherings that once took place at such sites. Toberlanniv appears by name on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which places it clearly within living memory of the surveyors who recorded it, and presumably within living practice. The eighty years between that first mapping and the 1921 edition were enough to reduce it from a named place to a memory of one. When the site was inspected in 2005, what remained was an area of damp ground roughly three metres across, scattered with loose stones, sitting in a field of bramble scrub at the townland boundary.

That boundary location is worth noting. Holy wells in Ireland frequently appear at liminal points in the landscape, edges between parishes, townlands, or types of land, which may reflect something of their original social and spiritual function as shared or neutral ground. Here the scrub and the damp earth are about all that mark the spot now, the stones offering no obvious clue as to what arrangement they once formed.