The name itself carries meaning: "tobar" is the Irish word for well, and the remainder likely preserves the name of a saint or a local figure now difficult to trace with certainty. Holy wells of this kind are among the oldest continuously venerated sites in the Irish landscape, pre-Christian in origin yet absorbed into Christian practice, typically associated with a patron saint whose feast day would once have drawn local people for rounds of prayer, known as a "pattern" from the Irish "patrún". The fact that this one survives as a recorded monument in County Mayo, a county with an exceptionally dense concentration of such sites, suggests it held some local significance, even if the details of that significance have grown quiet over time.