What makes this one stranger still is that the people who recorded it were already a little uncertain what to make of it.

When Ordnance Survey officers passed through the area in 1839 and compiled their field letters, a local observer noted the presence of a well called Tobar Eibhlinne, a name that translates roughly as the well of Eibhlín, an Irish feminine name roughly equivalent to Ellen or Eileen. The officer recorded the remark with a touch of dry scepticism: the well was "said to be holy (though its name does not sound very holy)". The parenthetical aside is a small window onto the period, when educated surveyors were methodically cataloguing the country's topography and occasionally allowing themselves a quiet editorial observation. Locally the name was softened in pronunciation to Tober Eileen, which is the form that survived in the townland name. Holy wells in Ireland were typically associated with a patron saint, a pattern day, or a tradition of cure, and were visited for specific ailments or prayers; this one, by the time it was being written down, seems to have carried the designation without the accompanying detail of whom or what it honoured.

By 1989, when the site was visited and recorded, the well itself had dried out entirely, leaving only a rough hollow in the ground. Whether it had once been a modest spring or something more substantial is not clear. What remains is essentially a depression in a field, the name outlasting the water.