The Irish "tobar" means well, and the "kyle" element likely derives from "coill," meaning wood, suggesting this was once a well associated with, or perhaps sheltered by, a woodland. Holy wells of this kind were once a common feature of the Irish landscape, serving as focal points for local devotion, pattern days, and the kind of quiet, persistent veneration that outlasted official religious structures by centuries.

What little is firmly documented about this site comes from cartographic evidence. The name Toberkyle appears marked in Gothic script on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, a detail worth pausing over. The use of Gothic lettering on early OS maps was not arbitrary; surveyors employed it specifically to indicate antiquities, places the mapmakers recognised as carrying some historical or traditional significance beyond ordinary topographical features. The fact that the name reappears on the 1900 revision suggests the site remained known and identifiable across more than sixty years of landscape change, even as rural Ireland was transformed by famine, emigration, and the slow alteration of land use.