Holy wells, typically natural springs venerated over centuries for their curative or spiritual associations, are scattered across the Irish landscape in their thousands, but relatively few carry a title as specific as this one. Tobernanaspog translates roughly as the Well of the Bishops, a name that implies some connection, now largely obscured, to episcopal authority or perhaps to figures of local religious significance.

The well was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1839, which places its documentation firmly within the great mapping project that swept across Ireland in the early nineteenth century. It appeared again on the 1900 revision under the same Irish placename, suggesting the name remained in active local use across those decades rather than fading into archival abstraction. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905 in his substantial history of the diocese of Ossory, notes it as Tubbernanaspug and offers the translation directly, linking it to bishops without elaborating further on which bishops, or in what period, or precisely why such a name came to attach itself to this particular spring. That silence is itself suggestive; the association is old enough that Carrigan, thorough as he was, could only record the name rather than explain it.