That absence is, in its own way, the point. The site carries one of the most evocative names in the Irish archaeological landscape, a name attached to dolmens and portal tombs across the country with remarkable frequency, as though the lovers of the old story had rested every few miles on their long flight across Ireland.

The name "Diarmuid and Grania's Bed" refers to the legend of Diarmuid and Gráinne, the great Irish tale of a pursued couple running from the wrath of Fionn Mac Cumhaill. The association of their name with megalithic structures, most of them Neolithic portal tombs dating back four or five thousand years, reflects a folk tradition of explaining ancient and mysterious stonework through the most romantic story available. This particular example appeared on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, suggesting it was still recognisable at that point as a distinct monument. By the time the 25-inch map was produced later in the nineteenth century, the entry had been downgraded to "Site of", the cartographic shorthand for something no longer standing. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing between 1902 and 1904, confirmed what the maps implied: the structure had by then completely vanished, and he described what had once been there as a ruined box of slabs, the characteristic form of a collapsed or dismantled tomb. A visit to the field in 2017 found no visible remains whatsoever at ground level.

What survives is essentially a location and a name on an old map. The gently undulating pasture still sits there, with a low rise of rock outcrop to the northeast, and the kind of open aspect that tends to characterise the settings chosen for these monuments. But the stones themselves are long gone, cleared away at some point between the first survey and the second, lost to the same agricultural improvement that reshaped so much of the Irish countryside across the nineteenth century.