Set within a rath, a type of circular ringfort typically associated with early medieval settlement, the small graveyard known as Lisheen was used for generations as a resting place for unbaptised children. These sites, sometimes called cillíní, occupy a particular and melancholy corner of Irish religious and social history. Catholic doctrine, for much of the country's history, held that unbaptised infants could not be buried in consecrated ground, and so communities quietly found other places, often ancient or liminal spots already set apart from the everyday world.

The place-name itself is recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled in the nineteenth century, where it appears as Lishín, later rendered Lisheen, described plainly as a burying place for unbaptised children. It was marked on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map simply as Lisheen Grave Yard, and by the 1922 edition the cartographers had added a clarifying note, labelling it a Children's Burial Ground. The site's character is understated in the extreme. At the centre of the rath interior stands a single upright slab, uninscribed, measuring roughly 0.7 metres high and 0.6 metres wide. To its north-east, a scatter of smaller stones barely breaks the surface; these are thought to mark individual graves, though no inscriptions or formal markers confirm it. The absence of names is itself a kind of record, reflecting the informal and often furtive nature of such burials, carried out without ceremony by families navigating grief alongside the weight of religious convention.