What was once a limestone outcrop roughly eighty metres across, used over generations to inter unbaptised infants, is now simply absent, consumed by the same industry that left a hollow in the ground where it once stood. The 1927 Ordnance Survey six-inch map still marks the location, labelling it with a quiet bureaucratic finality as 'Killacarrigeen Burial Ground (site of)', acknowledging both what the place had been and the fact that it was already, by that point, effectively gone.

The earliest written description comes from the Ordnance Survey Name Books of 1840, which recorded the site under the name 'Kyle a Chorrigeen' in Doon Parish. The surveyors noted a limestone rock of about four chains, roughly eighty metres, in diameter, and observed that children had been interred within it in the past, though the practice appeared already to have been abandoned by that time. They also noted the presence of a Trigonometrical Station on the rock, the kind of survey marker placed at elevated or prominent points across Ireland during the primary triangulation of the country. Children's burial grounds of this type, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for infants who died before baptism and were therefore, under older Catholic theological convention, excluded from consecrated ground. They appear across the Irish landscape in marginal or liminal locations: old ringforts, field boundaries, coastal strands, and, as here, exposed outcrops of rock.

There is nothing to see at Gortavalla South today. The quarrying that obliterated the site has left no visible trace of the burial ground, and the records offer no precise coordinates that would allow a visitor to stand at the exact spot. The value of coming here, if one were inclined to, lies less in what survives and more in the particular quality of absence, a place that the maps insist on naming even after the named thing has been removed. The 1927 map entry, with its parenthetical '(site of)', does the work that a physical monument might otherwise do, preserving a record of a practice that had itself already faded before the ground that held it was broken up and carted away.