What sets this particular example apart is the grim footnote attached to it: in 1475, Seán Ó Fearghail, Chief of Annaly, died here immediately after his inauguration feast. He was buried at the Cistercian abbey in Abbeylara, and the site passed into the complicated inheritance disputes that would define the O'Farrell clan for decades to come.

The motte at Moatfield, known in earlier sources as Ráith Granaird, is almost certainly where the O'Farrell clan conducted their inauguration ceremonies, the formal rituals by which a new Gaelic chief was recognised and installed by his people. The death of Seán Ó Fearghail set off a prolonged contest over leadership of Annaly, the territory roughly corresponding to modern County Longford. By 1489, the Lord Justice of Ireland had intervened to divide the chieftainship between the sons of Seán and the sons of Cathal. The arrangement did not hold indefinitely: around 1516, the sept and its lands were formally split, with the O'Farralls Bán taking the lordship of north Annaly, covering the northern and eastern portions of the county, and retaining Ráith Granaird as their inauguration site. The site thus carried ceremonial weight even through the fracturing of the dynasty that had built its identity around it.