The legendary Ulster hero has no obvious connection to this corner of Munster, yet the name attached itself to the site and persisted long enough to appear on Ordnance Survey maps and in antiquarian literature. That gap between the name and the reality is where things get interesting.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the features at Dromavally were read as burial monuments. William Borlase listed them as graves in 1897, and Killanin and Duignan's widely used 1962 guide to Irish monuments repeated the interpretation. When J. Cuppage surveyed the area as part of the Corca Dhuibhne Archaeological Survey published in 1986, a more prosaic picture emerged. The remains, it turns out, are most likely a collection of roughly built enclosures and shelters, probably constructed for sheep. One element stands apart slightly: a circular stone foundation roughly three metres in diameter and up to a metre high, which may represent the base of a small hut. Whether the legendary name came first and drew curious visitors who then described what they expected to find, or whether earlier surveyors simply misread the function of the structures, the site had accumulated a mythology well out of proportion to its modest stonework.

The story is a useful reminder of how place names can shape perception. Sites named for mythological figures, especially figures as culturally loaded as Cúchulainn, tend to attract correspondingly grand interpretations. What the fieldwork at Dromavally suggests is that the stones themselves were almost certainly put there by farmers, not commemorators, and that the legend was the landscape's most durable construction.