The name recorded on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1838 tells a more suggestive story: Tobernanarm, written in the ornate Gothic script the OS reserved for antiquities. 'Tobar' is the Irish word for a well, and the name points toward a site that was once almost certainly a holy well, the kind of place where people left votive offerings, scraps of cloth or small tokens, tied to nearby branches or pressed into the ground as acts of private devotion. When the well was inspected in more recent times, however, no such offerings were visible, and the spring itself was choked with weeds.

The well sits in what was once marshland, later reclaimed and drained. Its waters fed a stream called the Bellanabradaun, a name that has outlasted any ritual memory the site may have carried. The same name, Tobernanarm, appeared unchanged on both the 1838 and the 1920 editions of the six-inch OS maps, which suggests the place retained at least nominal recognition across those intervening decades, even as the land around it was transformed. O'Flanagan noted it in 1927, by which point it was already a curiosity rather than an active site of devotion. Today, housing developments press in from the west, north, and east, leaving the old spring hemmed in on three sides by suburban Galway.