Lisheenaneeve translates roughly from the Irish as "little fort of the young woman" or possibly "little fort of heaven", depending on how one reads the components, and that ambiguity alone suggests a place that has accumulated meanings over a very long time. Small enclosed burial grounds of this kind, often referred to as killeens or early ecclesiastical enclosures, are scattered across the west of Ireland. Some began as pre-Christian sacred sites, others grew around the graves of unbaptised children or local holy figures, and many blur the boundary between all of these categories. The name and the setting together hint at a site with a complicated past, one that sits at the junction of landscape, belief, and memory.

Killadangan itself is a coastal townland on Clew Bay, a stretch of water famous for its drowned drumlins, the rounded glacial hills that erosion and rising sea levels have reduced to a scatter of small islands. The broader area carries significant early medieval associations, lying within reach of Croagh Patrick to the south, a mountain with a pilgrimage tradition stretching back well before Christianity formalised it. Burial grounds in townlands like this one frequently served communities across many centuries, sometimes beginning as enclosures around an early church or hermitage, later absorbing folk customs around the dead that official religion never quite managed to displace. The word "lisheenaneeve" also contains the element lios or lisín, meaning a small earthen enclosure, which suggests the site may originally have been defined by a raised or banked boundary of the kind associated with early Irish settlement and ritual use.