The earthwork itself is a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area surrounded by one or more banks and ditches. Thousands survive across the Irish landscape, most associated with prosperous farming families of the early Christian period. What makes this particular example quietly distinct is what is said to have happened within it many centuries later.

According to local tradition, the interior of the rath was used as a burial ground during the Famine, the catastrophic period of hunger and mass mortality that devastated Ireland between the late 1840s and early 1850s. It may also have served as a place of burial for unbaptised infants. Such children were, under Catholic practice of the era, typically denied burial in consecrated ground, and families often interred them instead in liminal spaces: the boundaries of fields, the edges of old earthworks, or sites that already carried a sense of antiquity and separateness. The choice of a rath for both these categories of burial speaks to something persistent in Irish folk geography, a sense that ancient enclosures occupied a threshold between the ordinary and the otherwise, appropriate for those who, for one reason or another, could not be received by the parish churchyard. No grave markers or surface disturbance remain visible today, leaving the ground to hold whatever it holds without announcement.