The place is known in Irish as Cnocán na bPáistí, meaning the little hill of the children, and it belongs to a tradition found across Ireland: the cillín, or children's burial ground, where infants who died unbaptised were laid to rest separately from consecrated churchyards. Catholic doctrine once held that such children could not enter heaven, and so they were buried apart, in liminal spaces, at boundaries, on hillocks, beside old ruins. These sites are rarely signposted and seldom visited, yet they represent one of the most quietly significant categories of place in the Irish landscape.

This particular ground, set just above the northern shore of Lough Mask in County Galway, measures roughly fifteen metres east to west and twelve metres north to south, its boundary roughly subcircular. There are traces at the north-east of what may once have been a stone revetment, a low retaining wall of stacked stone used to define and hold the edge of the enclosure. The graves within are oriented east to west, as is customary in Christian burial practice, with the small upright markers arranged in rows. Much of the area is now overgrown, and the stones sit quietly among the vegetation, numerous enough to suggest this hillside was used over a considerable period by families in the surrounding townland of An Chloch Bhreac Láir.