It looks, to all appearances, like a practical arrangement for keeping livestock out of a water source. Nothing around it suggests prayer, or offerings, or any of the small rituals that usually accumulate around a holy well over centuries. And yet the maps say otherwise.

The Ordnance Survey recorded the site as Tobernaglora, rendered in Gothic script, on both the 1838 and 1947 editions of the six-inch maps. That name, and that lettering style, carries weight. The Gothic script convention was used by OS surveyors in the nineteenth century to mark places of antiquity or cultural significance, holy wells among them. "Tobar" is the Irish word for well, and the full name likely incorporates a personal or devotional element now difficult to unravel with certainty. The fact that the name persisted unchanged across more than a century of mapping suggests the site was, at some point, considered worth recording with care. What happened to any physical markers of veneration, whether a pattern of visiting on a particular saint's day, votive offerings, or a small structure above the well, is no longer apparent on the ground.