The land was once pasture, and before that it was the site of a killing so particular in its cruelty that it left a name behind long after every physical sign had been erased. The Irish place-name Pollnamarve translates roughly as the grave of the Mary Burkes, and the story attached to it is exactly that.

In 1592, following a battle at Cloonagashel, the English governor of Connacht, Richard Bingham, defeated a force associated with the Burke family. According to a reference recorded by the antiquarian John O'Donovan in 1838, Bingham subsequently had fifteen women killed, each of them named Mary Burke. Whether the shared name reflects a genuine coincidence of naming within the family, a deliberate pattern in how the women were identified by later tradition, or something lost in the telling, is impossible to say now. What the name Pollnamarve preserves is the community memory of the event itself, in the absence of any monument or physical remains. The site lies approximately 500 metres northeast of Cloonnagashel Castle.

Today the ground sits within the grounds of a golf club, and there is nothing on the surface to indicate what lies, or once lay, beneath it. The absence is itself the point. Place-names in Ireland frequently carry historical and sometimes violent memory that no archaeology can confirm or deny, and this is one of the starker examples of that. The name survived; the evidence did not.