It is a cillin, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used historically for unbaptised infants, and the quiet ordinariness of its setting belies what it represents: a parallel funerary geography that existed alongside, but entirely outside, the official structures of the Church.

Cillíní were widespread across Ireland well into the twentieth century, a consequence of Catholic doctrine which held that unbaptised children could not be buried in consecrated ground. Parents instead interred their infants in liminal spaces, places that occupied the edges of the settled world: old ringfort enclosures, the margins of bogs, townland boundaries, and occasionally pre-Christian burial sites. The Gortacurra enclosure, roughly fourteen metres north to south and twelve metres east to west, is a modest but clearly defined example. Its circular form and dry-stone boundary wall are characteristic of the type, and the trees that have grown up inside give it a degree of enclosure that sets it visually apart from the surrounding farmland. The site was recorded in an archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, which encompasses the country around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, published in 1994.

The markers inside are plain, as is typical of cillíní, where formal headstone inscriptions were rare and the graves of infants were often indicated only by small upright stones or simple field boulders. The cumulative effect of at least twenty such markers within so compact a space makes the scale of local use over time quietly apparent.