The pairing of these two things, a prehistoric or early historic monument and a post-medieval burial practice, is not entirely uncommon in Ireland, but it remains strange to encounter nonetheless. The ground is unenclosed and irregular in shape, and among the grass and earth, numerous set stones mark graves oriented east to west, the traditional Christian alignment placing the deceased to face the rising sun.

This type of site is known in Ireland as a cillín, an informal or unconsecrated burial ground used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic Church practice, could not be buried in consecrated ground. Mothers who died in childbirth, the stillborn, and young children who died before baptism were quietly laid to rest in marginal places: old earthworks, townland boundaries, coastal promontories. The choice of a rath for such a purpose was likely deliberate. These monuments, scattered across the Irish landscape in their thousands, occupied a liminal space in popular understanding, associated with the otherworld and with the sídhe, and therefore perhaps considered fitting ground for those who existed between worlds themselves. The Loughbown site preserves this layering of belief and loss in a modest arrangement of stones set into old earthwork ground.