Local tradition has long held that those heaps mark the foundations of stone buildings, and that three kings of Ireland lie buried beneath the ground inside. The enclosure is roughly 82 metres across, its mound rising about 2.1 metres, and a trench once ran around its perimeter, traces of which survived on the south-east side as late as the nineteenth century. A rath is a ringfort, typically a raised circular earthen enclosure associated with early medieval settlement, but what makes this one unusual is the layering of competing explanations for what it actually was and what it was called.

When the Ordnance Survey teams passed through in 1839, they recorded the local belief that the place was named Kileree, meaning the Cell of the Kings, drawing the name directly from the royal burials said to lie within. But the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, offered a different reading altogether. For him the townland name derived from Cill Láithrigh, meaning the Church of Laithreach, with Laithreach being the ancient name of the place, recorded as "Lavertach" in a document dated to 1247. Carrigan noted simply that the church, or kyle, had long since disappeared. The two interpretations, royal burial ground or early ecclesiastical site, are not necessarily incompatible. The large roughly circular enclosure may well have ecclesiastical associations, and the raised features visible within it could represent the remains of an early medieval church and associated buildings, though they do not form any pattern that would allow a firm conclusion.