Locals know it as the 'Fairy Clump' or 'Fairy Mound', and for generations it has been understood as something apart from ordinary ground, even if its precise nature was never formally pinned down. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840, their six-inch map recorded the spot only as a grove of trees, with no indication that anything archaeological lay beneath. The mound slipped through the record, unclassified.

What makes this site particularly intriguing is the possibility that the landscape itself carries the memory of it. The townland name, Townlough, derives from the Irish Tuaim Locha, which translates roughly as 'burial mound of the lake'. A tuaim, in early Irish usage, referred specifically to a sepulchral mound, a raised earthwork constructed over the dead, and place names of this type were often attached directly to a visible feature in the local terrain. The suggestion, advanced by local researcher Derek Ryan, is that this mound, sitting just 200 metres north of Townlough Castle on the lakeshore, may be the very feature that gave the townland its name. If that is the case, the mound predates not only the castle but quite possibly the entire tradition of naming that has kept its memory alive, however indirectly, ever since.