"Tobar" is the Irish word for well, and "Macduagh" points directly to Saint Colman Mac Duagh, the seventh-century bishop associated with the diocese of Kilmacduagh in south Galway, a figure whose name clings to holy wells, ruins, and placenames across the region. But when surveyors eventually came to examine this particular site, what they found was a large concrete pipe sunk into the ground, a loose ring of stones around it, and a small stream running off to the north-east. Cattle were drinking from it.

The name appears in Gothic script on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1838 and 1920, which is exactly the kind of cartographic treatment typically reserved for places of antiquarian or religious significance. Gothic script on an OS map is usually a signal: here is something old, or at least something that was once considered worth distinguishing. Yet whatever devotional or ceremonial life may once have attached to this well, none of it was apparent on the ground when surveyors visited. No pattern stones, no votive offerings, no obvious tradition of pilgrimage. Just the pipe, the stones, the water, and the cattle. The site lies in undulating pastureland roughly a hundred metres north-east of a burial ground, which adds a certain weight to the association with a saint's name, but even that proximity produced no clear evidence of religious use. By the time aerial imagery was captured in the early 2010s, the surrounding land had been developed as a golf club, folding this quietly ambiguous place into a very different kind of managed landscape.