The parenthetical "site of" is doing considerable work in that name. It signals not confirmed ground but a scholarly best guess, one that has never been firmly verified and may yet prove to be approximate at best.

The battle in question took place on 24 July 1261, when septs of the McCarthy Mors met and decisively defeated John Fitz-Thomas of the Geraldines, the powerful Anglo-Norman dynasty also known as the Fitzgeralds. It is described as the first real defeat suffered by the Anglo-Normans in Ireland, and its consequences were far-reaching: south Munster was, in effect, left free of serious invasion for the following three centuries. The location now marked on maps owes its position largely to the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan, who placed the battle at a site he identified as the English Callann, roughly five miles eastward of Kenmare, in the parish of Kilgarvan in the barony of Glenarough. O'Donovan's identification appeared in his annotations to the Annals of the Four Masters, and every subsequent commentator followed his lead without significant challenge. The difficulty is that a careful assessment of the available evidence does not confirm the Ordnance Survey position as the precise spot where the fighting actually occurred. The true location remains, for now, an open question awaiting further investigation.