The site is a rath, a type of circular earthen ringfort typically used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, and it appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846 as a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across. By the time anyone thought to record it in detail, the earthwork had been all but levelled, leaving only a subtly raised oval trace, measuring around thirty-six metres north to south and thirty-four metres east to west, barely distinguishable from the surrounding ground.

What gives this particular site its quiet strangeness is not its archaeology alone but what was remembered about it. The landowner, speaking from family memory, recalled that the rath once had an outer fosse, a defensive ditch encircling the bank, and that his father had told him the enclosure was used as a children's burial ground. This places it within a tradition found across Ireland, where ringforts and other ancient enclosures became the chosen resting places for unbaptised infants, known in Irish as cilliní. The practice arose partly from Church doctrine, which for centuries denied consecrated ground to children who died before baptism, and partly from a folk belief that the old, pre-Christian earthworks occupied a kind of threshold space, neither wholly of this world nor the next. The interior of the Barleymount rath slopes gently down towards the south-east, and it is easy to imagine how such a sheltered, bounded hollow, already set apart from ordinary farmland by its circular form and ancient associations, might have drawn that kind of use.