It is a cillín, the Irish term for an informal, unconsecrated burial site used for infants who died before baptism. For centuries, children who had not received the sacrament were considered ineligible for burial in hallowed ground under Catholic doctrine, and so families laid them to rest in these marginal spaces instead: the edges of fields, old raths, boundaries between townlands, or places already understood to carry some older, pre-Christian significance. The practice was widespread across Ireland well into the twentieth century, and the grief attached to these sites was often compounded by silence, the burials carried out at night or at dawn, without ceremony, without record.

Cilliní are found throughout Connacht, and Mayo has a particular density of them, a reflection of the county's long history of rural poverty, high infant mortality, and the particular hold of devotional Catholicism on everyday life. The theology that excluded unbaptised infants from consecrated burial was quietly set aside by the Catholic Church in the early twenty-first century, but the physical sites remain, many of them unmarked, some maintained by local families, others slowly absorbed back into the landscape. Lismeegaun sits in a part of Mayo where townland names still carry traces of older Irish-language geography, and the presence of a cillín in such a setting speaks to centuries of ordinary, unrecorded loss.