Tobar Rí an Domhnaigh translates roughly as the Well of the King of Sunday, a title that folds sovereignty and sacred time into a single water source on the Dingle Peninsula. The well itself is modest enough now, a natural spring enclosed within a concrete container, but the name points toward something older and more ceremonially charged than the present structure suggests.

Holy wells in Ireland were traditionally sites of pattern days, occasions when local communities gathered to perform rounds, a ritual practice of circumambulating the well a set number of times, often while reciting prayers, sometimes in bare feet. At this particular well, those rounds were made chiefly on Sundays, which likely explains or reinforces the Sunday element of its Irish name. According to Caoimhín Ó Danachair, writing in 1960, the practice continued here until around 1910, placing its active devotional life within living memory of the mid-twentieth century, even if that thread had by then gone quiet.