An Tobar Te, meaning the warm well, was described in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for the parish of Kilmalkedar as a rapid spring roughly five feet in diameter. By 1960, when folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair wrote about it, the same spot had contracted in description to little more than a marshy hollow. The contrast between those two accounts, separated by little more than a century, quietly tells the story of a place that slipped out of use and then out of memory.

The warmth implied by the name is not explained in surviving sources, though warm or tepid springs were sometimes associated in Irish tradition with curative or sacred properties, which may account for the ritual activity once performed here. Stations, meaning a prescribed circuit of prayers and physical movements carried out at a sacred site, were observed at An Tobar Te until somewhere around 1810 or 1820, according to the Ordnance Survey Name Books. After that, the practice appears to have ceased, and without the steady attention that pilgrimage brings, the well gradually reverted to the landscape around it. It sits now in the corner of a field at the foot of the slopes, neither monument nor ruin exactly, just a wet hollow in a corner that was once considered worth the walk.