In the townland known as Gortnalour, in Clear Island parish near Skibbereen, the Irish place name translates directly as the field of the lepers. That name alone is the evidence. There are no earthworks, no stone foundations, no visible traces of any structure in the ground.

The scholar Lee, writing in 1996, noted the place name and suggested it points to a leper hospital or colony that once operated here. Leprosy in medieval Ireland was treated as both a medical and a spiritual condition; those afflicted were frequently separated from their communities and housed in dedicated enclosures or small colonies on the edges of settled areas. The land itself was identified by its owner as the specific field associated with the tradition, but beyond the name and that local memory, nothing more is known. No documents record who lived here, when the colony was established, or when it ceased to function.