Chevy Chase is a place in Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC, a medieval Scottish-English border ballad, and, apparently, a cottage in the west of Ireland. The name alone raises questions that are not easily answered.

The ballad of Chevy Chase, which tells of a bloody hunting dispute between English and Scottish nobles on the Cheviot Hills, was one of the most widely known pieces of vernacular verse in the English-speaking world from the fifteenth century onward. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it had become a touchstone of literary antiquarianism, admired by figures like Philip Sidney and later by Joseph Addison. It is entirely possible that a literate landlord or tenant with Romantic sensibilities applied the name to a rural dwelling in the way that many Irish cottages and houses of that era were given fanciful or literary names, sometimes reflecting the tastes of a particular owner, sometimes as a light joke, sometimes for reasons that have since been entirely forgotten. Without more detailed records, the exact origin of this particular naming remains open.

Lahardaun itself is a small rural area in the barony of Kilmaine, and Galway's western landscape of low hills, bog, and stone-walled fields gives the name an additional incongruity. A cottage here carrying the echo of a border skirmish ballad is the kind of small, unresolved curiosity that local history tends to preserve without quite explaining.