The word "tobar" in Irish means a well, and "altóir" means altar, so the name translates roughly as the well of the altar, a pairing that suggests a site where devotional practice and ancient monument have overlapped across centuries.

The site is documented in Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, published in 1964. That survey remains a foundational catalogue of prehistoric funerary monuments across the country, recording the court tombs, portal tombs, and passage tombs that survive in varying degrees of completeness across the Irish landscape. A court tomb is a Neolithic monument, typically consisting of a roofed gallery for burial preceded by an open, semicircular forecourt thought to have served a ceremonial function. That Tobernahaltora appears within this survey places it among Mayo's prehistoric burial tradition, a county that contains a remarkable concentration of megalithic remains, many of them still only partially studied. The name itself, blending a Christian reference to an altar with the older form of a sacred well, points to the kind of layered, long-term significance that many such sites accumulated over millennia, absorbing new meanings without entirely losing the old ones.