It carries a place-name that hints at something older beneath the surface: the Irish "lios" refers to a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosures that served as farmsteads and defended homesteads across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, and which survive in their thousands as low grassy banks and ditches across the Irish countryside. The "traghee" element likely derives from a word relating to a strand or shore, suggesting the site sits in landscape shaped as much by water as by human settlement.

Gorteen and its surrounding townlands occupy a quiet stretch of south Mayo, a county whose archaeological record is extraordinarily dense, ranging from Neolithic court tombs on the Atlantic fringe to early Christian enclosures tucked into bogland. Many of the smaller, less celebrated monuments in this part of Ireland, ringforts, enclosures, earthworks, survive simply because the land around them never warranted the kind of intensive development that would have erased them elsewhere. Whether the monument at Listraghee is a ringfort proper, a related enclosure, or something else altogether is not yet a matter of public record.