At some point, relatively recently in the long span of local memory, the interior of the earthwork became what Irish tradition calls a lisheen, an unofficial burial ground for unbaptised children. No stone marks the ground, no boundary separates it from the surrounding field, and no visible surface trace survives to tell a passing stranger what the place once held.

The ringfort itself, a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, would have been a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, probably occupied somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries. That such sites were later repurposed as children's burial grounds is not unusual across rural Ireland. Catholic teaching historically denied church burial to infants who died before baptism, and families turned instead to liminal places already set apart from ordinary use, old earthworks, boundary ditches, the margins of consecrated ground. These sites are known variously as cilliní, lisheens, or knockeens depending on the region, and hundreds survive across the country. What is particular to Ballinphuil is the combination: a functioning ringfort reclaimed across the centuries, used in this way until fairly recently according to local tradition, and now leaving no physical evidence at all of either occupation.