The site, known in older sources as Kyleaumery, occupied a natural hillock and was in use long enough to accumulate what nineteenth-century observers described as a great number of human bones alongside the boards of coffins. It is classified as a children's burial ground, a type of site known in Irish as a cillín, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, often quietly and without formal ceremony, on the margins of parishes and in liminal landscape features like old earthworks or elevated ground.

The hillock on which the burials lay had also functioned, at some point, as a fort, the kind of enclosed earthwork that recurs across the Irish countryside as evidence of early medieval settlement. In 1810, the entire small hill was levelled to facilitate the construction of the coach road from Nenagh to Limerick. The bones and coffin boards came to light during that work, and the Ordnance Survey Namebooks of around 1840 record what had been found, drawing on earlier observations by those documenting the landscape before systematic mapping. The account compiled by John O'Flanagan in his OS Letters, published in 1930, places the site precisely at the old turnpike junction, giving some sense of how prominently this crossroads once featured in the movement of people and goods through North Tipperary. Today there are no visible remains at ground level; the road itself is the only monument to what was removed.