The spring in a hollow of low-lying farmland just off the Galway to Ennis road carries none of that. No offerings, no evident ritual use, just a small drystone well-chamber covered by a single capstone, fed quietly by a natural spring that, on occasion, dries up altogether.

The place appears on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, with its name spelled out in Gothic script as "Tobersruhlin", the older cartographic convention used to mark features of antiquity or local significance. By the 1920 edition, something had shifted: the same name had migrated roughly thirty metres to the northwest, now attached to the well rather than the spring itself. The Irish form, "Tobar Sruithlinn", was recorded in the OS Letters compiled by John O'Donovan and later published by Michael O'Flanagan in 1927. Local explanation at the time of that survey translated it simply as "the well of the little stream", a modest, descriptive name that makes no claim to sanctity or legend. The well is a "tobar" in the straightforward sense, a functional feature of the landscape rather than a site of pilgrimage.

What makes it quietly interesting is precisely that absence of ritual weight. Wells across Ireland were frequently folded into patterns of local devotion, their springs attributed to saints, their surrounds decorated with offerings. This one, tucked into farmland beside a busy national road, seems to have escaped that process entirely, or if it ever held such meaning, no trace of it remains. The discrepancy between the two OS editions also raises an unanswered question about whether the name originally belonged to the spring, the well, or both, and what, if anything, changed in the eighty years between surveys.