What makes it quietly puzzling is that nobody is entirely sure what it was, and the name attached to the townland around it carries two entirely different explanations, each pointing to a different kind of past.

When the Ordnance Survey officers passed through in 1839, local people told them the mound was a rath, a circular earthen enclosure of the kind commonly built throughout early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or a seat of local power. They described it as roughly 82 metres in diameter, with a mound about 2.1 metres high, the interior nearly level with the top, and a surrounding trench of which traces survived on the south-east side. Scattered across the surface were small heaps of stones and thorns, and neighbours insisted these marked the foundations of stone buildings. They also passed on a tradition that three kings of Ireland lay buried there, and that the townland took its name from this fact: Kileree, the Cell of the Kings. The historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, offered a different reading altogether. He translated the name as Cill Láithrigh, the Church of Laithreach, and noted that the ancient name of the place, Laithreach, appears as "Lavertach" in a document dating to 1247. The church itself, he added plainly, had long disappeared. On the ground today, raised features within the large circular enclosure do not resolve the question. They suggest the presence of an early medieval church and associated structures, but they do not form any pattern clear enough to be read with confidence. A rath and an ecclesiastical enclosure, a burial ground of kings and a vanished church: the place holds both possibilities without confirming either.