Not a battlefield, not a monument, not even a particularly dramatic landscape feature; just a field, a hollow, and the memory of a stone loosed across water with lethal precision. The field's name, recorded on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Beorlyon, derives from the Irish Beor-Laighionn, and it was already being pointed out to visitors with what one nineteenth-century observer called "great traditional confidence" as the precise location of the killing.

The story, as recorded by the scholar John O'Donovan in the 1830s, runs as follows. After her husband Oilioll was killed by Conall Cearnach, Maeve withdrew to Inis Clothran, the old name for Inchcleraun, where she was required by custom to bathe each morning in the well near the island's entrance. Forbaid, son of Conor of Ulster, learned of this routine and travelled alone to the island to reconnoitre. He measured the distance from the well's edge to the opposite shore of the lake using a thread, then returned to Ulster with that measurement. Later, spotting Maeve at her morning bath, he loaded a stone into his crann tabhuill, a type of sling, and fired it across the water, striking her in the forehead and killing her outright. The means of the killing, a carefully ranged sling-shot rather than a sword or spear, gives the story an almost clinical quality that has clearly lodged in local memory. By 1891, a resident islander named Dan Farrell was still describing the hollow where the well had been and recounting the same essentials: the bathing, the stone, the death, as naturally as one might describe a neighbour's field.