The site measures roughly twenty metres by fifteen, and it sits at the centre of an early church enclosure at Selloo, though nothing visible above ground suggests that generations of families once came here to bury their youngest dead quietly, and without ceremony.

According to local tradition recorded by Smyth in 1953, the ground was used exclusively for children from around 1800 onwards. This kind of burial place, known in Irish as a cillín, was a common feature of the rural landscape across Ireland. Catholic doctrine of the period held that unbaptised infants could not be buried in consecrated ground, so communities set aside marginal or ancient spaces, often old ecclesiastical sites like this one, for burials that fell outside the formal church rites. In 1983, a drainage trench cut across the site in a north to south line turned up bones as well as something unexpected: a fragment of a decorated shaft from a high cross, the carved stone arms and scriptural scenes of which were a distinctive feature of early medieval Irish Christianity. That fragment is now held at the County Monaghan Museum. Other significant pieces once associated with the site have not fared as well. Two bullaun stones, rounded boulders with deliberately hollowed basins whose purpose may have been ritual or practical, and the base of a cross, are both recorded as missing from the burial ground.