The Irish name preserved at this site, Lisín na nGarlach, translates as "little ringfort of the children", and that name alone signals the particular kind of sorrow attached to the place. This is a killeen, or cillín, an informal burial ground used for those who, under Catholic practice, could not be interred in consecrated ground: unbaptised infants, and sometimes others who fell outside the boundaries of official rite.

The site sits at Bunagarha in north Kerry, and what survives today is the sub-circular mound of what was once likely a ringfort, the kind of small enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland. Such earthworks were frequently repurposed in later centuries as cillíní, perhaps because they already carried an air of separateness from the ordinary working landscape, or simply because the raised ground offered convenient, undisturbed soil. Faint traces of two fieldbanks still run into the site from the south-east and south-west, suggesting the kind of agricultural boundary-making that accumulated around such places over generations. Crucially, this killeen remained in use up to and including the Famine period, meaning that during the catastrophe of the late 1840s, families in desperate circumstances were still bringing their dead children here, to an unmarked patch of old earth rather than the parish churchyard.