The name itself carries weight. Poll, in Irish, typically denotes a hole, a pit, or a hollow in the land, sometimes a cave or a deep recess in a riverbank. Raithní points to ferns, the bracken-type growth that colonises damp, undisturbed ground across the west of Ireland. Together, the name suggests something like the fern hollow, or the ferny pit, a place unremarkable enough in appearance that nature has long since moved back in, yet significant enough to have been formally recorded as a monument.

The townland name, Boleycloghagh, is itself worth pausing over. Boley derives from the Irish buaile, a seasonal milking place or upland pasture where cattle were driven in summer months, a practice once widespread across Ireland and closely associated with the transhumance traditions of rural Connacht. Cloghagh suggests stony ground. The combination conjures a real working landscape, rocky summer grazing land somewhere on the Mayo terrain, the kind of place that accumulated human use across centuries without ever drawing much formal attention. That a named archaeological feature sits within it is unsurprising; Mayo is dense with such things, many still awaiting full documentation.