It is a modest thing to look at, a square pool held in on three sides by a low modern wall, with a step on the open side and a drainage hole at the base that releases the water into a shallow surface stream and then into a field drain beyond. The name, Tobernaveen, follows the Irish tobar na bhfian or a related form, linking the site to the word for a well or spring, a category of place that carries considerable antiquity in the Irish landscape. Holy wells and sacred springs were focal points for local communities long before and long after the arrival of Christianity, and many were associated with patron saints, patterns, or seasonal gatherings. Whether this particular well held any such ritual function is not recorded, but the name alone suggests it was once considered significant enough to be named and remembered.

What makes the setting quietly arresting is not the well itself but its immediate neighbourhood. Within roughly 75 metres to the north-northwest lie two burnt mounds, a form of prehistoric site, sometimes called fulacht fiadh, consisting of a horseshoe-shaped heap of fire-cracked stone produced by repeated heating and water-boiling, most commonly dated to the Bronze Age. A standing stone, the kind of tall upright megalith erected across Ireland from the Neolithic through the early medieval period, stands approximately 200 metres further in the same direction. The clustering of a spring, two burnt mounds, and a standing stone in such close proximity is not accidental by the standards of prehistoric landscape use; water sources were practical necessities and, frequently, ceremonially significant features around which communities organised activity and perhaps belief. The concrete enclosure of a later era sits, then, at the edge of a much older and denser pattern of human presence in this corner of Sligo.