These features, sometimes called march mounds or meering mounds, were raised to define the edges of territories, parishes, townlands, or estate holdings, and they were once far more common across Ireland than the surviving examples suggest. Many have been ploughed flat, built over, or simply forgotten. The ones that remain tend to do so quietly, easy to walk past without registering what they are.

Boundary mounds occupy an interesting position in Irish archaeology. They are not defensive, not funerary, not ceremonial in any obvious sense. Their purpose was purely administrative, a physical anchor for agreements about land that might otherwise exist only in memory or in documents vulnerable to loss or dispute. In a pre-cadastral landscape, before maps were precise enough to settle an argument, a mound you could point to and stand beside carried real legal and social weight. The townland name Lissyegan itself hints at older layers of occupation, with the element "lios" typically referring to a ringfort or enclosed settlement, suggesting this was a settled and organised landscape long before any boundary mound was raised in it.