Known locally as Leaba agus Uaigh Chúchulainn, or Cuchullin's Bed and Grave, the site in Dromavally was long associated with the great Ulster hero of Irish mythology, and earlier observers duly interpreted its rough stonework as ancient graves and cairns. The Ordnance Survey maps recorded it in those terms, as did William Borlase in 1897 and Killanin and Duignan in their 1962 guide. The reality, when examined more carefully, turns out to be considerably more prosaic.

A 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, the Dingle Peninsula's Irish-speaking heartland, concluded that what visitors are actually looking at is a cluster of roughly-built enclosures and shelters, most likely constructed for sheep. Among them sits one circular foundation, about three metres in diameter and standing up to a metre high, which may have served as a hut site, a simple single-roomed structure of the kind once common across upland and coastal areas of Ireland. The gap between the mythological name and the functional reality is itself worth pausing over. It is not unusual for unremarkable field monuments to accumulate legendary associations over centuries, particularly in a landscape as densely storied as the Dingle Peninsula, where the place-names alone constitute a kind of compressed history. What began as a shepherd's shelter or a drover's enclosure became, somewhere along the way, the bed and grave of a hero.