Most visitors to the Beara Peninsula would pass within a few hundred metres and notice nothing unusual. Local tradition, however, holds that these modest markers identify the resting place of soldiers who died in one of the most brutal episodes of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland.

The Siege of Dunboy in 1602 was the final act of a prolonged and violent campaign to crush Gaelic and Spanish resistance in Munster. George Carew, President of Munster and the Crown's instrument in the region, led the assault on Dunboy Castle, the stronghold of Donal Cam O'Sullivan Beare on the Beara Peninsula. The castle fell in June of that year after fierce fighting, and its defenders were killed or executed almost to a man. Carew's own forces did not emerge unscathed, and the site at Derrycreeveen, roughly 200 metres from the southern shore of Bearhaven Harbour, is said by local tradition to be where some of those men were buried. The stones, largely obscured now by gorse and rush-covered grazing land, offer no inscriptions or formal markers; their identification depends entirely on an oral tradition that has persisted for over four centuries.

The site sits on rough grazing ground and is not formally managed or signposted. The gorse that covers much of the slope makes the stones difficult to locate and easy to overlook even when you are standing close by. Late winter or early spring, before the gorse growth thickens, would offer the clearest view of what little remains visible above ground.