The field is called Páirc an Leasa, meaning roughly "the field of the fort", a name that functions as a kind of fossilised memory, preserving in the Irish language the outline of something that has long since vanished from the ground.

A rath is an earthen ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a settlement or farmstead, built and used mainly during the early medieval period. They survive in many thousands across the island, and yet here, at An Scragán in County Kerry, the physical structure is gone. According to the local placename recorded by the scholar and writer Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha, better known by his pen name An Seabhac, writing in 1939, the memory of the leas, meaning the fort or enclosure, was preserved in the field name even then, though the earthworks themselves had already disappeared within living memory. That a community continued to name the land after a structure it could no longer see speaks to how deeply such sites were woven into the everyday geography of rural Irish life.