To a passing driver it would register as nothing at all. Yet local tradition, recorded as far back as 1839, holds that this unremarkable widening once held a cairn, a leacht, ringed by seven old whitethorn trees, and that it marked the burial place of a man dead for nearly a thousand years.

When Ordnance Survey officers were gathering place-name lore for their Letters in 1839, they noted the site under the name Leacht Dubhluing, meaning Dubhluing's Heap or Monument. A leacht is a commemorative stone cairn, a form of monument found across early medieval Ireland, often associated with saints or notable figures. The people living nearby at the time could say nothing of its origin beyond the name itself. The compilers of the OS Letters, however, pointed to the Annals of the Four Masters, which record the death of Dubhluing O'Brenan, described as the third prince of Idough, in the year 954. Idough was a territory in what is now north Kilkenny. By 1987, when the site was examined on the ground, the seven whitethorn trees had long gone, the cairn had disappeared entirely beneath the vegetation, and only a single thorn tree remained to mark the spot.