To most eyes it would look like nothing at all, a few irregular stones in a field. But this modest scatter marks a cillín, an informal burial ground used for unbaptised children, the kind of marginal, quietly sorrowful site that exists in considerable numbers across rural Ireland, often tucked into pre-existing ancient enclosures, away from consecrated ground.

The site sits just north of the centre of a ringfort, one of the circular earthwork enclosures that were built as farmsteads across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts were often regarded in later folklore as charged or otherworldly places, associated with the fairy mounds, and this ambiguity may partly explain why they were sometimes chosen for cillín burials. Children who died before baptism were, under older Catholic teaching, denied burial in consecrated ground, and so families interred them in liminal spots, boundaries, ancient earthworks, and shorelines. The Lissavally site was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1926 to 1927, which suggests it was still known and identifiable within living memory at that point, even if it was already fading.

Today the visible evidence is minimal. A few stones protrude above the turf within the ringfort interior; otherwise there is no surviving surface trace. The location is worth knowing about not because it offers a dramatic sight, but because of what that near-invisibility represents: the particular kind of forgetting that settled over these burial places across the twentieth century, as the social and religious circumstances that created them receded.