Tobernacoragh, whose Irish name Tobar na Corach translates as Well of the Fair Wind, was once associated with a folk ritual to calm stormy seas. The idea that a spring of fresh water, welling up from beneath an exposed offshore island, might hold some sway over the surrounding ocean says something about how urgently sailors and islanders once needed to believe in such things.

By the time the antiquary W. F. Wakeman visited and recorded the well in 1893, it was already a structure worth documenting carefully before it deteriorated further. He described a corbelled building of the beehive class, meaning a drystone dome constructed without mortar, with each ring of stones overlapping slightly inward until they met at the top. From the well, a stone-lined channel, flagged at each end and open in the middle, ran northward for roughly six metres, cut to a depth of about 0.76 metres through clay and rock. Wakeman noted a scarcely-ever-ceasing flow of bright sparkling water passing from the well through the channel. That flow is long gone. A survey carried out between 1997 and 1999 and published by Jerry O'Sullivan and Tomás Ó Carragáin in 2008 found a disordered heap of stones roughly two metres by three, surrounding a small wet hollow with no standing water. The large slabs still spanning the hollow are the last legible remnants of the lintelled roof Wakeman saw more or less intact. The outflow channel, once so deliberately engineered, now winds seaward as an irregular trickle through long grass and weeds. The well's name appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1837 and 1912, suggesting it remained a recognised and named feature of the island landscape well into living memory, even as the structure housing it quietly collapsed around the spring.