These were not ordinary graveyards. Known in Irish tradition as cillíní, children's burial grounds of this kind were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic canon law, were excluded from consecrated ground. They are found across Ireland, often in marginal or ancient locations, and carry a particular quiet weight in the landscape.

The site at Lisheennagaurlagh is associated with the remains of a possible nearby chapel, and its graves were recorded in 1952 by McCaffrey, who noted eleven marked plots in total, six to the south and five to the west of the old church structure. The headstones and foot-stones were described as well fashioned, and were probably salvaged from the chapel itself, their good quality suggesting a degree of care in a place that formal religion had otherwise left aside. Local information gathered by McCaffrey indicated that the last burial here took place in the late 1930s, meaning living memory once reached back to its use. When the site was first formally inspected in February 1983, the grave-markers were still visible, small and aligned east to west in the customary orientation. By June 1992, however, the ground had been entirely overtaken by dense blackthorn and briar, and the site had become impenetrable. What had been a legible, if modest, memorial landscape had effectively been swallowed by the scrub within a single decade.