It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1840, even though the workhouse immediately to its north was already under construction at that time. By 1897, when the twenty-five-inch edition was produced, the same ground is clearly marked as a burial ground, roughly 73 metres north to south and 62 metres east to west, enclosed by field boundaries on its eastern and western sides and a ditch to the north. Whatever happened in the intervening decades to fill that ground, the cartographic record simply skipped the beginning of it.

Kilmallock Union Workhouse was built between 1839 and 1840, part of the network of institutions established under the Irish Poor Law to house the destitute. As the Famine took hold in the late 1840s, such workhouses became overwhelmed, and a forty-bed fever hospital was added to the Kilmallock complex sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, recorded on the Cassini edition of the OSi map under the annotation 'Hospital (Infectious Diseases)'. The burial ground lying immediately east of the road known as Bohergarrode, which itself marks the townland boundary between Millmount and Gortboy, would have served those who died within these institutions. The absence of the burial ground from the 1840 map suggests it came into use after that survey was completed, placing its origins squarely within the Famine period and its immediate aftermath.

The site is now incorporated into Kilmallock Famine Memorial Park, which gives it a degree of public accessibility that many comparable burial grounds lack. It sits just south of the former workhouse complex, and Bohergarrode provides a useful navigational reference along the townland boundary. The roughly triangular shape noted on the 1897 map is the feature worth orienting yourself to when reading the landscape; field boundaries that once enclosed the ground may still be legible depending on how the park has been managed. As with most famine burial grounds, there are no individual grave markers, which is itself part of what the place communicates.