The site is recorded as a children's burial ground, a ceallúnach or calluragh in Irish tradition, meaning an unconsecrated plot reserved for unbaptised infants, people who died by suicide, or others excluded from sanctified ground. Yet the graves here have also been read as something far older, and that ambiguity is precisely what makes the place so quietly compelling.

The difficulty lies in the stones themselves. Scholars have proposed two competing interpretations. T. F. Henry, writing in 1937, read the structures as megalithic cists, a form of prehistoric stone-lined grave chamber typically associated with Bronze Age burial. Tom Fanning, writing in 1981, favoured the ceallúnach reading, placing them within the tradition of early medieval and later Irish burial practice. A cross-slab at the site points to an Early Christian presence, and a second possible grave-slab was once recorded but has since gone missing. Either the graves belong to that Early Christian phase, or the site was a much older monument that was repurposed, as happened frequently across Ireland, as a calluragh burial ground in later centuries. What complicates any easy resolution is that the stones used are unusually large, larger than is typical for Christian burials, which keeps the prehistoric interpretation alive even after the Megalithic Survey of Ireland formally rejected the site as a megalithic tomb. The result is a site suspended between eras, not quite fitting the categories imposed on it.