That combination, a monument to a mistaken death, a story attached to a named individual rather than a forgotten collective, sets it apart from the usual anonymous prehistory of such mounds. The cairn has since been levelled, and what remains is little more than a memory recorded in a brief antiquarian note and a scatter of older material in the surrounding ground.

The story attached to the site was recorded by Grove White between 1905 and 1925, in his multi-volume survey of Cork antiquities. He noted that local tradition identified the mound as the burial place of 'old Downan', said to have been killed by mistake by a chain shot during 'the old wars'. Chain shot, two cannon balls linked by a length of chain and fired together, was principally a naval weapon used to shred rigging, though it also saw use on land to devastating and indiscriminate effect. The phrase 'old wars' is unspecified, but the tradition suggests an event vivid enough to survive in local memory into the early twentieth century. By the time the site was properly surveyed, the cairn had been levelled, and the ground in its vicinity showed evidence of fulacht fiadh activity. A fulacht fiadh is a type of prehistoric cooking or industrial site, typically identified by a spread of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, often found near water. Their presence here suggests the hilltop had significance well before any gunfire, accidental or otherwise, shaped the folklore of the place.