No names, no dates, no epitaphs. These are the grave-markers of unbaptised infants, buried here in a practice that was once widespread across Ireland and is now among the more quietly unsettling legacies of how Catholic doctrine shaped everyday life and death in rural communities.

Places like this are known in Irish as cillíní, marginal burial grounds used for those whom the Church did not permit to rest in consecrated ground. Unbaptised children, stillborns, and sometimes suicides or strangers were interred in such spots, often at liminal locations: old raths, cliff edges, boundaries, or, as here, on rough pasture on the shoulder of a ridge. The enclosure at Gort Na Cille measures roughly 20.5 metres by 27.5 metres, and is bounded partly by modern walls, partly by large upright slabs and outcrops of natural rock along its eastern and southern sides. Inside, the grave-markers are densely packed in east-west rows. Most stand between 20 and 50 centimetres high, though some are considerably taller, and a number of long thin slabs lie flat on the ground. Across the eastern half of the site, a scattering of quartz stones sits on the surface, a detail that recalls the widespread folk association between quartz and the dead, found at burial sites across Ireland from prehistoric times onward. One further oddity sits at the western end of the southern wall: the entrance to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind typically associated with early medieval settlement, its narrow rock-cut opening, less than a metre wide, now blocked by a displaced lintel. A researcher named O'Connell also noted a fallen gallaun, a large standing stone, somewhere within or near the site, though its precise location has not been established with certainty.