The well at Ballyellis was known locally as Tubber Lughin, translated as the Well of the Duck, and the name was no accident. Local tradition held that a druid named Mardhol was being carried away by floodwaters on the Awbeg when he grabbed the leg of a huge drake at this precise spot, and the bird hauled him to safety. It is the kind of origin story that tends to be older than anyone can properly date, and yet the site itself acquired a surprisingly literal memorial to it.

By the eighteenth century, a masonry buttress had been built over the well, and whoever commissioned it took the founding legend seriously. According to the antiquarian Grove White, writing in the early twentieth century from earlier records, the structure was surmounted by a duck carved in stone. Alongside it stood carved figures of a swan and drinking vessels, and cut into the stonework was the inscription "James Barre 1746", suggesting a specific patron who either restored or embellished the site at that date. The combination of a pre-Christian water cult, a druidic rescue myth, and a Georgian-era carved duck is an unusual one even by the standards of Irish holy wells, which often accumulate layers of belief and rebuilding across centuries. The well does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which is curious given that the carved stonework was already nearly a century old by then.

The site is no longer accessible, having been swallowed by dense overgrowth, and the carved stonework described by Grove White has not been documented in recent years. Whether the duck in stone survives beneath the vegetation is an open question.