Known in Irish as Leaba agus Uaigh Chúchulainn, or Cuchullin's Bed and Grave, the site invokes one of the most celebrated figures in Irish mythology, a warrior hero whose name became attached to prehistoric and early medieval remains across the country, often as a way of explaining structures that local memory could no longer account for. What survives at Dromavally is considerably more modest than legend implies.

For generations, the remains here were read as graves and cairns. The Ordnance Survey mapmakers recorded them as such, and that interpretation carried through to William Borlase's 1897 antiquarian survey and later to the well-thumbed 1962 Shell Guide by Lord Killanin and Michael Duignan. A 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, carried out by J. Cuppage as part of a systematic study of the Dingle Peninsula, reassessed the site and reached a more prosaic conclusion. The features are, in all likelihood, the remains of roughly-built enclosures and shelters, probably used for sheep. Among them, however, is a circular stone foundation measuring around three metres in diameter and standing up to a metre high, which may represent an earlier hut site, a simple single-roomed structure of the kind built by farmers or seasonal herders across this part of Munster for centuries.

The gap between the mythology and the archaeology is part of what makes the site interesting. A name evoking the bed and grave of a legendary hero turns out to mark what was probably a working landscape, used by people tending livestock on the peninsula's hillsides. The heroic nomenclature was almost certainly applied long after the structures fell out of use, the gap in memory filled by association with a figure large enough to explain anything that looked old and unexplained.