The Irish phrase points, loosely, to a small flat stone associated with a woman or female figure, the kind of folkloric label that tends to accumulate around megalithic remains when their original purpose has long been forgotten. Such names are often the last surviving thread connecting a community to a monument it no longer fully understood.

The site at Caltragh, County Sligo, is documented in Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, the fifth volume of which, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989, focused specifically on County Sligo. Ó Nualláin's survey was a landmark project in Irish prehistoric archaeology, systematically recording megalithic structures, which are monuments built from large stones, typically dating to the Neolithic and early Bronze Age periods. County Sligo is particularly well represented among such structures, being home to the Carrowmore complex and the Knocknarea cairn, and the county's landscape holds many lesser-known sites alongside those famous ones. Caltragh itself sits within this broader concentration, and the monument at this location would have formed part of a ritual or funerary landscape used by farming communities several thousand years ago.