The legendary Ulster warrior, a central figure in the great mythological cycle of Irish literature, lends his name to various sites across the country, and this one in Dromavally is no exception. The problem is that the archaeology tells a rather more prosaic story.

Writers and mapmakers across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recorded the features here as graves and cairns, a cairn being a mound of heaped stones that can mark everything from a prehistoric burial to a mountain waypoint. Borlase noted them as such in 1897, and Killanin and Duignan were still describing them in similar terms as late as 1962. When J. Cuppage surveyed the area as part of the Corca Dhuibhne Archaeological Survey published in 1986, however, the interpretation shifted considerably. What the site most likely contains is a series of roughly-built enclosures and shelters, the kind put up by farmers to manage sheep on open ground. Among them sits a circular stone foundation, three metres in diameter and up to a metre high, which may represent the remains of a small hut site rather than anything ceremonial or funerary. The leap from sheep shelter to the resting place of a mythological hero is a long one, but it is the kind of imaginative attribution that scattered stones and a compelling name have always encouraged.