Tobershanvally sits on the characteristic clint and gryke pavement of County Clare, where slabs of bare limestone are split by deep fissures, and the whole surface is thick with hazel scrub. The well was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in both 1842 and 1915, named on the earlier edition as Tobershanbally, but when the site was physically inspected in 1997, no visible remains could be found. The name itself survives; the well, or whatever once marked it, does not.

What makes the absence more interesting is the company the site keeps. An ancient field system of possible antiquity spreads out to the south-west, linking the well's location to what may be a burial ground. Closer still, within roughly twenty to thirty metres, lie two fulachtaí fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone beside what was once a water trough, usually dated to the Bronze Age. A small stream still runs north-east past the eastern edge of the site, which may explain why activity of various kinds accumulated here over a long period. Springs and water sources drew people, and they left traces in layers: field boundaries, cooking sites, a well that carried a name long enough to appear on two editions of a nineteenth-century map, and then nothing solid at all.