What lies beneath or around it was once a cillín, a children's burial ground, of the kind found quietly scattered across Ireland, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were laid to rest in marginal spaces, at boundaries, beside ancient earthworks, or in corners of fields that carried their own older sanctity.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the 1830s as part of the great topographical documentation of Ireland and later edited by Michael O'Flanagan, recorded the Irish place name here as Lisín Na n-Garlach, meaning the lisheen of the children, a burying place. A lisheen is a small enclosure or little fort, often a diminutive of the word lis, referring to a ringfort or earthwork, and the name suggests that the site had a distinct identity in the landscape long before it was formally noted. The recorded form, Lisheennagarlagh, preserves that identity even now that no physical trace of the original burial ground survives above ground. The modern graveyard, roughly 45 metres long and 25 metres wide, has absorbed the site entirely, leaving nothing visible of whatever earlier arrangement of mounds, stones, or earthen boundary once marked it out.