The well at Lissenhall appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the designation "Well", but vanishes from the cartographic record thereafter, a small erasure that says something about how surveyors weighed the question of what was worth marking at all.

When the Ordnance Survey fieldworkers passed through the area around 1840, they recorded the well under the name "Toberavault" or "Toberavault House", a name with an Irish-language prefix, "tobar" being the common word for a well or spring. The surveyors noted it as "a spring well of excellent water" considered locally to be a holy well, though they could obtain no information about the origin of the name. Holy wells in Ireland are typically associated with a patron saint, a pattern day, or some local tradition of cure or veneration, and the absence of any such story gave the scholar John O'Donovan pause. He wrote bluntly in the Namebooks that he did not think the name worth recording on the map, doubting it had any real antiquity, and suggested it be marked simply as a well or spring well. His scepticism carried the day. The name was dropped, and the well slipped into obscurity.

What makes the site quietly interesting is its setting among other features that do carry a religious charge. Patrick's Well, a site with the kind of clear saintly dedication that O'Donovan was looking for, lies roughly ninety metres to the east. About two hundred and seventy metres to the south-south-west sits a bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into it, that was later re-used as a mass rock, a flat surface where Catholic priests celebrated Mass in secret during the Penal period. The Lissenhall well stands at the edge of this loose constellation of sacred or semi-sacred features, neither fully belonging to it nor entirely separate from it. Later inspection found no physical evidence of religious use at the spring itself, which appears to be nothing more, and nothing less, than a natural well.