It derives directly from the Irish word dubhán, meaning fishing hook, and the peninsula took that name from a Welsh monk called Dubhán, who probably settled here in the 5th century. His community grew into a parish church, which grew into a ruin in a graveyard on the flat, narrow neck of the Hook peninsula in County Wexford, bordered on the south-east by a public road. The place is quietly anomalous: a ruin that is nearly complete, a church whose name is literally a translation of a saint's name, and a building whose oldest fabric is older than anyone can say with certainty.

Dubhán was a son of Breacaun, whose own church stood roughly 3.3 kilometres to the north-east on the peninsula's eastern side. The peninsula itself was once known as Rinn Dubhán Ailithir, the point of Dubhán the pilgrim. By the late 13th century the monks here had adopted the Augustinian rule and taken the name of St. Saviour's, though later attempts to identify this community with the better-known St. Saviour's in New Ross were erroneous. In 1245 the monks were ordered to maintain the lighthouse tower they had built at the peninsula's tip, roughly 1.2 kilometres to the south. After the suppression of the Knights Templar of Templetown in 1314, that tower passed to the mayor and Corporation of New Ross. The parish eventually came under the Knights Hospitallers of Kilcloggan, and at the Suppression in 1541 it was appropriated to them. A Royal Visitation by the Protestant bishop of Ferns, Thomas Ram, recorded in 1615 that Thomas Fleming was vicar and both church and chancel were still in repair.

The fabric of the building preserves a kind of layered argument about time. The east end of the nave is clearly older than the west end, distinguished partly by its use of Old Red Sandstone and the remains of antae, the projecting wall-stubs characteristic of early Irish church construction. The later western extension brought a pair of opposing round-headed doorways in the nave walls and corbels suggesting a gallery above them. A double bellcote over the west gable, with two openings of unequal size, collapsed around 1998. The chancel contains a three-light ogee-headed window in coarse Old Red Sandstone conglomerate, a piscina, a statue shelf, and a large tomb-niche that was inserted as an Easter Sepulchre, a liturgical feature used to represent Christ's burial during Holy Week. Much of the carved stonework is in Dundry stone, a pale oolitic limestone quarried near Bristol and widely traded to Irish sites in the medieval period. Outside the north nave wall a recumbent slab carries a crudely incised latin cross, and a small granite cross to the east of the chancel, probably 18th century in date, was moved here from St. Breacaun's church around 1900. Conservation work by Wexford County Council, completed in 2016, uncovered further dressed stones including a fragment with possible Romanesque decoration.