Knocknacaltragh translates roughly from the Irish as the hill of the caltrach, a word associated in placename tradition with a place of battle dead or unconsecrated ground, the kind of site where those who died outside the margins of Christian burial rites might be laid. These liminal burial places, sometimes called cilliní in the Irish tradition, were used for unbaptised infants, strangers, and others excluded from consecrated churchyards, and they tend to sit at the edges of townlands, on boundaries, beside water, or on slightly elevated ground, as if occupying a careful distance from ordinary life.

The placename alone suggests this site belongs to a category of burial ground that was widespread across Ireland yet rarely documented with the same attention given to formal ecclesiastical sites. Such places were used quietly, by necessity rather than ceremony, and the communities that maintained them did so outside the written record for the most part. The name Caltragh itself appears elsewhere in Irish townland nomenclature precisely because this type of ground was recognised and named, even when it was not formally recorded. Without further surviving detail specific to this Mayo site, the physical character of the ground, whether marked by small stones, hollows, or simply an undisturbed patch of rougher vegetation, remains undescribed.