The word "kileen" (or "cillin") refers to an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated churchyards under Catholic canon law, a practice once common across Ireland and carried on quietly, often in marginal or liminal spots in the landscape. This particular kileen sits in sloping pasture between two tributaries of the Owbeg, and was already out of use before the end of the nineteenth century.

The Ordnance Survey Name Books, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of Ireland's first systematic townland survey, recorded the site simply as a "burial place for children ... not fenced in". Today it measures roughly 24.7 metres north to south and 19 metres east to west. A low stone wall, crudely built and standing to about 0.6 metres in height and 0.9 metres in width, survives along the western and north-western edges, and may once have enclosed the whole site, though dense overgrowth makes a full assessment difficult. The southern interior is raised about 1.5 metres above the surrounding ground, and is scattered with small block-like slabs and larger boulders, most of them now fallen. A few small upright slabs remain standing, averaging around 0.3 metres high. There is also a local tradition that a bullaun stone lies somewhere within the site; a bullaun is a boulder or outcrop with one or more cup-shaped depressions, often associated with holy water or early Christian ritual. It had not been located at the time the site was surveyed, possibly obscured beneath the heavy overgrowth, which has also allowed land clearance debris to accumulate against the inner face of the western wall.