Ringforts, the circular enclosures built largely during the early medieval period as farmsteads or defended homesteads, were sometimes regarded in later centuries as charged or otherworldly ground, which may partly explain why communities occasionally chose them as burial places. Here, that choice appears to have been made long before the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were produced in the mid-nineteenth century, since the site was already marked as a graveyard by then.

The place-name attached to the site offers a more particular detail. The word lisheen is a diminutive form of the Irish lios, meaning a fort or enclosure, and in burial contexts the diminutive form was frequently applied to sites reserved for the interment of unbaptised children or infants, who by the conventions of Catholic practice could not be buried in consecrated ground. These informal burial grounds, known variously as cillíní or lisheens, were scattered across the Irish countryside and tended to occupy liminal spaces, old earthworks, shorelines, or unconsecrated plots at the edges of townlands. The name here hints, then, that the ringfort at Ballybrit may once have served that sorrowful function, a place set apart for children outside the formal rites of the Church. By 1970, however, the site was recorded as being in use for general burial, suggesting that its earlier, more restricted purpose had long since faded.