These low, uninscribed markers are believed, according to local tradition, to indicate the graves of unbaptised infants, a category of burial that occupied a particular and sorrowful place in Irish rural life for centuries.

A cashel is a stone-walled circular enclosure, typically of early medieval origin, and this one at Cloonfane contains within it a burial ground documented on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1838 and 1920. The interior of the cashel is divided by a later stone wall, roughly 0.8 metres wide and 0.8 metres high, running east to west slightly south of centre. The grave markers lie to the south of this dividing wall, scattered among a general spread of loose stone. The practice of burying unbaptised children outside consecrated ground, in places known in Irish as cillíní, was widespread across Ireland well into the twentieth century. Because Catholic doctrine held that unbaptised infants could not enter heaven, they were excluded from parish churchyards, and families instead brought them quietly to liminal places: the edges of fields, ancient enclosures, shorelines. Old cashels and ringforts, already set apart from everyday use and carrying a sense of otherworldliness in local memory, were frequently chosen for this purpose. The site at Cloonfane fits that pattern precisely, its pre-Christian enclosure repurposed across generations as a place of unofficial, grief-marked interment.

The site is largely obscured by blackthorn, and the grave markers themselves are small and easily missed. Anyone visiting should expect a landscape that gives little up at first glance, requiring patience and some careful attention to the ground underfoot.