This is one of many such sites across Ireland, where raths, the circular earthen enclosures built as farmsteads during the early medieval period, were later repurposed as informal burial grounds for infants who had died before baptism. Because Catholic doctrine historically denied these children a place in consecrated ground, families turned instead to older, liminal spaces, places already set apart from the everyday landscape, and raths, long associated in folk memory with the supernatural, often served that purpose.

The rath at Ballyvicmaha contains a single oblong heap of stones, roughly six metres east to west and three to four metres north to south, rising to about 0.4 metres in height, positioned slightly to the north of the enclosure's centre. Whether it is a grave at all remains genuinely uncertain. Cultivation ridges run across the interior of the rath on a broadly east to west axis, and the stone heap may simply be a clearance cairn, the kind of pile a farmer builds when turning stony ground over for tillage. Beyond the stone heap itself, no physical evidence has come to light that confirms a burial function. The tradition survives in local memory, but the ground has so far kept its ambiguity.