Local tradition holds that unbaptised children were buried within its interior, leaving behind no headstones, no kerbing, no markings of any kind. The ground keeps its silence entirely.

A rath is a ringfort, typically an enclosed circular area bounded by an earthen bank and ditch, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of habitation. In Irish folk practice, these ancient enclosures were sometimes repurposed as burial grounds for infants who had died without baptism. Catholic doctrine, until relatively recent times, held that such children could not be buried in consecrated ground, and so communities found their own solutions. Liminal places, already set apart from ordinary land, were often chosen: raths, coastal margins, unconsecrated ground at the edges of parishes. The choice of this particular rath at Gortshanavogh for that purpose is recorded in local information cited by O'Hare in 1997, though the site itself bears no physical trace of what took place there. There are no visible graves and no grave-markers remaining within the enclosure.