A stone plaque fixed to a nearby wall records the date precisely: 11th November 1583. That the grave's exact status remains contested, and that the road itself is the primary memorial, gives the site an odd, layered quality that a formal monument rarely achieves.

Gerald FitzGerald, the fourteenth and last Earl of Desmond, had spent the final years of his life as a fugitive. The Desmond Rebellions, the Geraldine family's prolonged attempt to resist Elizabethan authority in Munster, had collapsed after years of war. Sir George Carew's forces demolished the earl's castles and scattered his followers, and by 1583 Gerald was reduced to sheltering in this wood, about four miles east of Tralee, poorly dressed and accompanied by only a handful of attendants. According to an account preserved in an Irish manuscript and recorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1841, his pursuers tracked him to a ruined house, where they found an elderly man lying before a fire. When the old man faintly said, 'Spare me, I am the Earl of Desmond', a man named Kelly O'Moriarty struck off his head regardless. The head was carried to the Earl of Ormond, who sent it to Queen Elizabeth, and it was displayed on London Bridge. The writer Philip O'Sullivan Beare, in his history of Irish Catholics, claimed that a stain of the earl's blood remained visible at the spot for years afterwards, calling the glen Gleann na Ginki, which he translated as Silva Cunei. The Moriarty family, the Ordnance Survey noted, were still held in low regard locally in 1841 for the killing.

What the Ordnance Survey surveyors found at the site in 1841 was a small oak trunk on the south side of the road marking the place of the killing, and, about thirty yards to the east on the north side, a shallow grave-shaped hollow roughly five feet long and three feet wide, edged with a low bank and containing a few suckers from a large memorial tree that had by then decayed. Folklore collected from local schools in 1938 adds that the grave was marked by a heap of stones on a height, with an old road beside it, and that a light was said to be seen there at night. One tradition holds that the body was later exhumed and taken elsewhere for burial, with Kilnananima Graveyard near Castleisland given as the final resting place on the 1983 plaque. The precise truth of the burial is, at this point, genuinely uncertain, which is perhaps fitting for a man who spent his last years leaving no fixed trace at all.