The stones are oriented east to west, as was customary, and the area they occupy measures roughly fourteen metres in length and width. This is a cillin, a type of unconsecrated burial ground once used across Ireland for unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic practice from burial in consecrated parish cemeteries. These sites are among the quieter, more sobering remnants of Irish rural life, places where grief was conducted at a remove from official religion.

The site sits on the edge of an esker, one of the long, winding gravel ridges deposited across the Irish midlands and west by meltwater streams running beneath glaciers during the last ice age. Esker edges were frequently chosen for burial grounds and other liminal uses, occupying a kind of in-between territory, neither the flat farmland below nor the more prominent high ground above. Traces of a possible enclosing wall survive at the south-west of the plot, and a modern field wall now forms the north-western boundary. The earliest published reference to the site appears in O'Flanagan's 1927 work, which places it within a longer tradition of recording such grounds in Connacht.