There is nothing dramatic about it, no tower, no carved stone, no obvious entrance. The original entrance has been lost entirely, and what you are left with is a quiet earthwork that has accumulated, over the centuries, two quite different and irreconcilable identities.

A rath, or ringfort, was typically a circular or oval enclosure used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, its bank and ditch marking the boundary of a family's living space and livestock. This one in Lecks measures approximately 32 metres on its longer axis and 30 metres across. What makes it unusual is the layering of local belief around it. Writing in 1948, the scholar Davies noted that the rath was locally believed to be a church site, suggesting a Christian reuse or reinterpretation of an older enclosure, something that happened often enough in early Irish settlement. But running alongside that tradition is a separate and older-sounding piece of local memory, recorded from 1740, that identifies the site as a children's burial ground. These were known in Irish as cillíní, unconsecrated patches of ground where unbaptised infants and others excluded from the churchyard were quietly interred. The fact that both traditions attach themselves to the same earthwork points to the way a single place can absorb several layers of meaning, none of them necessarily wrong, and none entirely provable.