A spring-well in County Kildare that feeds into the River Boyne carries a name that implies an entire ecclesiastical world, yet no church, monastery, or religious settlement has ever been recorded anywhere near it. The well's name contains the Irish element "tobar" (well) combined with "kill", a version of the Irish "cill", meaning church, a word that usually signals the presence of an early Christian site in the landscape. Here, though, the church implied by the name has left no trace, no ruined walls, no graveyard, no cartographic record, nothing at all to explain why the name took hold.

What is known is that the well was once the focus of a pattern on June 24th, the feast of Saint John the Baptist, a date that drew communal gatherings at holy wells across Ireland well into the modern era. Jackson, writing in 1979 to 1980, noted that this practice had already ceased by that point. The well itself sits at the western foot of a low rise, overgrown and unenclosed, and gives rise to a small stream that travels roughly 180 metres to the northwest before joining the River Boyne. That a tributary of the Boyne should begin at a well with strong ecclesiastical associations, however unverifiable, is the kind of quiet coincidence that Irish topography tends to produce without explanation.