In early Irish, "fert" refers to a grave or burial mound, and "echtra" suggests an otherworldly journey or adventure, the kind of liminal voyage that appears repeatedly in early Irish literature as a passage between this world and the next. That a megalithic site should carry such a name is not unusual in itself, but it speaks to a long continuity of memory, the sense that local people across many centuries understood this ground to be marked, set apart, associated with the dead and with passage.

The site was documented by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, the second volume of which covered County Mayo and was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964. That survey remains one of the foundational catalogues of Irish prehistoric monuments, systematically recording the court tombs, portal tombs, passage tombs, and wedge tombs scattered across the western counties. Mayo is particularly dense with such remains, a reflection both of the region's early settlement and of how relatively undisturbed much of its upland and bogland has been over the intervening millennia. De Valera and Ó Nualláin's fieldwork brought together measurements, orientations, and structural observations that have continued to inform understanding of how these monuments were built and used.