The stones are set haphazardly across a roughly subcircular patch of ground, measuring around twelve metres east to west and under nine metres across its narrower axis, enclosed by a very low bank of earth and stone. There is no formal arrangement, no inscribed markers, no church record attached to the spot. This is a cillín, or children's burial ground, one of hundreds of such sites across Ireland where, for centuries, unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were laid to rest by their families in secret, makeshift ceremony.

The practice arose from a specific theological circumstance. Under Catholic doctrine as it was widely understood and applied in Ireland, infants who died before baptism could not be buried in a churchyard. Families responded by returning, often at night, to ancient or liminal ground, places already set apart from ordinary use. Here at Caherhugh, the burial ground sits within or immediately adjacent to an existing enclosure, a feature common to many such sites, where proximity to an older earthwork or boundary lent the place a sense of precedent and perhaps protection. The low enclosing bank is modest but deliberate, a boundary that separates this ground from the surrounding landscape without announcing itself.