The name belongs to a widespread folk tradition across Ireland, in which portal tombs and other megalithic structures were attributed to the legendary lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne, said to have slept at a different spot each night while fleeing the wrath of Fionn Mac Cumhaill. Dozens of monuments around the country carry some version of the name, and the pattern tells us something interesting: ordinary people, encountering these ancient and unexplained stone structures in the landscape, reached for the most dramatic story available to account for them.

By the time the Ordnance Survey Name Books recorded this particular site at Cloghane, it had already been reduced to what the surveyor described as 'a small heap of stones'. That description, modest as it is, at least confirms something was physically present when the first edition maps were being compiled in the nineteenth century. What remained was presumably the collapsed or robbed-out remnant of a megalithic tomb, the kind of prehistoric funerary monument, typically several thousand years old, that once would have consisted of large upright stones supporting a capstone, often covered by a cairn of smaller material. The Dingle Peninsula is unusually dense with prehistoric remains, and J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region catalogued this site among many others, even as its physical presence had dwindled to almost nothing.

The honest note here is that there is nothing left to see. The site at Baile Uí Bhuinn is a place that exists more fully in cartographic memory than in the ground, which is itself a particular kind of historical fact worth sitting with.