The uncertainty is not a failure of record-keeping but rather the point: Tobernahaltora is a site where ancient megalithic structure and early Irish devotional practice became so thoroughly entangled that later observers could not agree on where one ended and the other began. What is clear is that at least two wedge tombs, the type of megalithic burial monument built with a broad, high entrance that narrows and lowers toward the back, stood here alongside standing slabs and a spring, and that together they formed the setting for a turas, a circuit of prayer stations walked in a prescribed order as an act of penitence or petition.

The turas at Tobernahaltora was observed between the 24th and 29th of June each year, a window that corresponds to the feast of St John the Baptist, a date long associated in Ireland with outdoor ritual and the blessing of water. Caoimhín Ó Danachair, writing in 1960, recorded that pilgrims once came in considerable numbers, moving between the altar, a low mound with upright slabs breaking its surface roughly 150 yards from the well, and the well itself, stopping also at a single upright slab and a pair of contiguous standing slabs positioned between the two. By his time, only a few still made the rounds. The well, which local tradition held to be inside one of the wedge tombs, was dry. The legends attached to it are vivid and specific: the water would not boil, a fish was found living in it, and the spring dried up or moved after someone profaned it by drawing water for ordinary domestic use. The 1842 Ordnance Survey map labels the various features with unusual precision, marking a penitential station, an altar, a cromlech, and the well, though subsequent editions shifted the well's position, placing it some 60 metres to the south-west and separate from any tomb. Local usage complicated things further, with one tradition identifying tomb 2 simply as "the well", collapsing the distinction between container and contents entirely.