Yet the name Duffins Well carries within it a much older geography, one that predates the Ordnance Survey maps of 1839 and 1925 on which it is quietly recorded in italic script, and possibly predates any living memory of why it was considered worth marking at all.

The name is thought to be a corruption of Dubhán, the patron saint of the parish, and that connection gives the well a significance it might not immediately suggest. The Hook peninsula itself was once known as Rinn Dubhán Ailithir, meaning the point of Dubhán, pilgrim, a name that frames the whole promontory as a place of religious journey. Holy wells in Ireland were typically sites of pattern days and devotional visits, often tied closely to the saint whose name they bore. This one, however, sits in an ambiguous position. John O'Donovan, the scholar who travelled the country around 1840 gathering place-name evidence for the Ordnance Survey, made no note of it, and there is no surviving record of veneration attached to the site. Whether it was ever genuinely a holy well, or whether the name is simply an echo of Dubhán's wider presence across the landscape, cannot now be resolved. Hook church lies roughly 850 metres to the south-southwest, a proximity that might once have meant something, or might be coincidence. What remains is a functional covered well with a pump, its older name still faintly visible through the anglicised spelling, sitting on ground that was once considered the pilgrim's point.