The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map carries the words "Milla or Lisheen" beside a circular enclosure in this area, and that notation is what gives the site away. A lisheen, in Irish tradition, refers to a small, informal burial ground used for unbaptised children, sometimes called a cillín, set apart from consecrated ground and often situated near older earthworks or field boundaries. The word "milla" points to the same kind of place by a different local name. Together, they signal what the landscape itself no longer shows.

The site is associated with a nearby enclosure, a roughly circular earthwork of the kind that appears across the Irish countryside in various forms, sometimes prehistoric, sometimes early medieval. Children's burial grounds of this type were frequently placed at or near such features, perhaps because the ground already carried some sense of age or significance, or simply because the enclosure boundary offered a practical edge. Whatever the reasoning at Cahergal, only faint traces of the enclosure now survive, and the burial ground itself leaves no surface trace at all. It exists, essentially, as cartographic memory rather than physical archaeology.