But this particular spring, tucked into hazel scrub on the western side of the valley, carries the name Tobar Lonáin, and for generations it was considered a place where ritual attention was owed. By the time surveyors inspected it in 1997, there were no structural remains, no votive offerings, no physical sign that anything of significance had ever happened there. The water simply appeared from under the rock and flowed westward. Yet within living memory, people were still coming.

The dedication is assigned to Bishop Lonan or Flannan, two early medieval saints whose names occasionally overlap in the placename record of western Ireland. Flannan, associated with Killaloe in Co. Clare, lends his name to a cathedral and a scattering of sites across the region. The well appears under the anglicised form Toberlonaun on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1840 and 1916, a sign that it was considered noteworthy enough to mark across two editions. John O'Donovan and Curry, writing in the nineteenth century, noted that stations were being performed there in 1839. Stations, in this context, refers to a pattern of prescribed prayers and movements around a sacred site, often performed on the feast day of the relevant saint, a practice with roots stretching back into early Christian and possibly pre-Christian custom. The well sits within a multiperiod field system, and roughly 150 metres to the west-northwest lies Derrynavahagh cashel, a stone-walled enclosure of the kind typically associated with early medieval settlement. The proximity of well and cashel is not unusual in the Irish landscape; the two features often cluster together, suggesting a long continuity of use in a single area.