The ground inside is uneven, colonised by dense ferns, and the stone wall surrounding it is relatively modern. Yet the site carries a particular weight, because the people buried here were, for different reasons, excluded from consecrated ground.

According to local tradition, the enclosure served as a burial place for two distinct groups: unbaptised infants and drowned sailors washed ashore on the island. Both categories reflect the hard theology and harder geography of coastal Irish life. Unbaptised children, under Catholic doctrine as it was long practised, could not be interred in blessed ground, and so communities set aside separate plots, often called cillíní, for them. These were liminal spaces, neither fully within nor fully outside the Christian burial landscape. Drowned strangers presented a different problem: unknown identity, uncertain faith, and the simple practicality of a body recovered from the sea on a remote island. The enclosure on Inis Bigil appears to have absorbed both necessities. The site measures roughly 23 metres north to south and just under 21 metres east to west, large enough to suggest sustained use over time, though nothing visible now marks individual graves.

The hill itself, low but prominent, sits above the surrounding terrain and looks out across open water in all directions. That exposed, panoramic position is not unusual for a cillín. These plots were often placed at the margins, on boundaries between the settled and the wild, reflecting the ambiguous status of those interred within them.