According to local tradition, this one was used as a burial ground for unbaptised infants, a practice that places it within a category of site found in many parts of Ireland but still poorly understood and only gradually receiving serious attention.

These burial grounds, often called cillíní or, in some areas, knockanes, occupy a liminal space in Irish religious and social history. Catholic doctrine held that unbaptised infants could not be buried in consecrated ground, and so communities turned to older, pre-Christian places, raths, cliff edges, shorelines, and the margins of townlands, to inter these children. The choice of a rath at Lissatava follows a pattern seen elsewhere in the country, where prehistoric or early medieval earthworks, long understood as places set apart from ordinary life, became associated with those excluded from formal burial rites. The practice continued in some areas well into the twentieth century, long after the theological reasoning behind it had begun to soften.

The interior of the rath at Lissatava is now heavily overgrown, and no grave markers were visible when the site was recorded. That absence of markers is itself typical. These burials were rarely, if ever, commemorated with stone or inscription; the knowledge of what lay there passed through families and neighbours rather than through any official record, which is part of why so many such sites remained unacknowledged for so long.