The word itself is a diminutive of the Irish lios, meaning a fairy fort or ringfort, and lisheens of this kind carry a particular weight in Irish tradition. Unbaptised infants, and sometimes children who died before formal church burial was possible, were interred in liminal places, sites that existed on the margins of the sanctified world. A ringfort, a circular enclosure built in the early medieval period as a farmstead and defended by earthen banks or stone walls, was exactly such a place, old enough and otherworldly enough to serve as an acceptable threshold between the living and the dead.