That quiet ritual, recorded by a local observer in 1842, is almost all that survives of a pattern, the Irish tradition of communal prayer and assembly at a sacred site on a saint's feast day, that was held here for generations before it fell out of practice.

The well sits in rough, undulating pasture in the Noughaval area of County Clare, set into the western face of a rock outcrop roughly two metres high. A small terrace between the hollow and a drystone wall to its west is periodically waterlogged from the well's seepage, and a drainage outlet runs through the wall at the southern end. The name presents its own small puzzle. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and 1920 both record it as Tobermogua, reflecting the local Irish form Tobar Mo Ghua. But the OS Letters of 1839 suggested the true name was probably Tobar Mic Duach, meaning the well of Mac Duach, and argued that the pattern was more correctly held on 3rd February, St. Mac Duach's feast day, rather than the 10th that local tradition had preserved. James Frost, writing in 1893, recorded the dedication to St. Colman MacDuach, the seventh-century monk associated with the Burren and with Kilmacduagh in County Galway, whose name attached itself to a number of sites across this part of Clare. Whether the name drifted through generations of use or whether the 10th of February represents a parallel local calendar is not now recoverable.

The well is not alone in its landscape. A medieval church and graveyard lie roughly 85 metres to the south-west, and a holy tree is associated with the well itself. This clustering of features, well, tree, church, and burial ground, is characteristic of early Christian sacred sites in Ireland, where the boundaries between different kinds of sanctity were porous and overlapping. The well was dry when it was last formally examined, and no votive offerings remained, but the dressed stone terrace and drainage outlet suggest that it was once carefully maintained, a small piece of managed infrastructure at the edge of the Burren's limestone outcrops.