Locally it is called An Caisleán Cruinn, meaning roughly the round castle, a name that quietly encodes a long tradition of puzzlement or reverence around what is, archaeologically speaking, a kitchen midden: a refuse heap left by earlier communities, built up over generations from discarded shellfish, bones, ash, and domestic waste. That gap between name and reality is part of what makes the place curious. A mound of ancient rubbish has accumulated the dignity of a castle in local memory.

Kitchen middens are among the most unassuming of archaeological features, yet they can preserve remarkable environmental and dietary evidence, recording what people ate, how they lived, and how coastlines and habitats changed over time. The site at An Caorán Beag was noted as large and round in its original form, though only slight remains survive. A reference in a 1914 publication by Brunicardi may point to the same site, suggesting it was already known to outside observers in the early twentieth century, even if it attracted little sustained attention. The local placename, collected by oral communication from a T. Robinson, suggests the mound was significant enough in the landscape to earn its own designation long before any formal record was made of it.