The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps record it as Lisheeneenaun, and it is the first part of that name that draws attention. The element lisheen is a diminutive of lios, the Irish word for a rath or enclosure, but in placename usage it frequently attached itself to a particular kind of site: a cillín, or informal children's burial ground. These small, unofficial burial places were used for centuries across Ireland to inter unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground. The name, in other words, carries a strong suggestion that this earthwork was once associated with such a place.

When the site was physically inspected, however, no visible surface trace of any burial ground could be identified. Whatever may once have been there, if anything was, has left no mark that survives at ground level. That absence is itself telling. Cillíní were rarely marked with headstones or formal boundaries, and many have disappeared entirely into farmland or scrub over the centuries. The record here rests entirely on the placename, which the Galway Archaeological Survey, working out of University College Galway, noted as the basis for the site's classification. A name preserved on a nineteenth-century map is sometimes the last evidence that a practice or a place ever existed at all.