They are the only visible sign that this place served, at some point, as a burial ground for children, a function preserved not in any formal record but in local memory passed down over generations.

The enclosure itself is a cashel, a type of circular dry-stone fort common across early medieval Ireland, built without mortar and typically used as a defended farmstead or settlement. At Poulaphuca, the cashel's interior took on a secondary and more sombre role, one that belongs to a broader Irish tradition of burying unbaptised infants in liminal or unconsecrated places. These burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were often sited at boundaries, on the margins of bogs, or within older monuments whose pre-Christian associations made them suitable ground for those excluded from churchyard burial. The small stones scattered across the eastern section of this cashel's floor are consistent with that practice, each one marking a grave without name or inscription. A field inspection carried out in 1997 recorded both the physical evidence and the local oral tradition that identified the site, the two sources reinforcing one another in the absence of documentary proof.

The combination of a cashel and a cillín at a single location is not unique in Ireland, but it is a reminder of how ancient structures were quietly repurposed across centuries, accumulating layers of use that no single period of history fully accounts for.