Local tradition holds that this was a lisheen, the Irish term for a small, informal burial ground used for unbaptised infants, children who, under Catholic doctrine, could not be interred in consecrated ground. These sites were found across Ireland for centuries, often tucked beside prehistoric earthworks, field boundaries, or other liminal features of the landscape, places considered neither wholly of the living world nor beyond it.

The association here is with an existing earthen mound, and that pairing is not incidental. Lisheens were frequently sited at prehistoric monuments, partly because such features already carried a sense of otherworldliness in local memory, and partly because they stood at the edge of normal social and sacred space. The unbaptised child occupied a similarly in-between position in popular theology, and so the logic of place and belief converged. The Barreel site carries no official record of burials, and nothing survives above ground to indicate where, precisely, the lisheen lay in relation to the mound.