There is no hollow worn by kneeling pilgrims, no rag tied to a nearby branch, no rough stone surround. It simply exists, invisible from ground level, at the foot of a steep-sided valley where a small stream runs west to east roughly five metres to the south. Most holy wells in Ireland carry the marks of long devotion, but this one appears to have attracted none.

Its name carries more character than the site itself immediately suggests. Recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1925 in gothic script as Tobarnabobaunia, the name is more properly rendered in Irish as Tobar na Bó Báine, meaning the well of the white cow. The white cow, or bó báine, appears in Irish folklore as a supernatural or otherworldly figure, sometimes associated with abundance and occasionally with the landscape itself, and place names involving her are scattered, if rarely, across the country. That a well should carry such a name without any recorded tradition of veneration attached to it is quietly puzzling. The cartographers noted it twice across nearly a century of mapping, which suggests local knowledge of the place persisted, even if whatever story once explained the name did not.