This is a large cairn of stones at the top of Ballyheady Mountain which is about 3 miles to the west of Ballyconnell.
The following is a local legend connected and accounting for the cairn.
Once in Meath a chieftain committed some crime and drew the wrath of the people upon him. A crowd of women gathered to kill him. They filled their aprons with stones to stone him to death and they started for the place of his abode. But he heard of their coming and fled northwards. They pursued him, still taking stones with them in their Aprons. With his pursuers close at his heels the criminal was fording the River near Ballyconnell; now known as The Woodford River, and he got drowned. The women foiled of their prey, went to the nearby mountain and emptied out the stones from their Aprons at its top.
Such was the origin of the cairn.
From the 1930s Schools Collection of folklore at Duchas.ie.
I also found the following:
It is now, of course, quite impossible to discover the identities of the personages whose remains have rested in the Ballyheady cairn for three thousand years. History is silent on the matter, but there is a local tradition that this cairn marks the burialplace of Conall Cernach, the hero of the Tain Cycle. [...] Conall Cernach, who was the foster-brother of Cuchullain, was murdered by the desperadoes of Queen Medb at Ath na Mianna – the Ford of the Miners – in Breiffne. [...] It is generally accepted that Ath na Mianna was on the River Graine, now the Woodford River, and in the neighbourhood of the present town of Ballyconnell.
From the Breiffne Antiquarian Historical Society Journal for 1931-1933.
