The burial area is unenclosed, roughly seven metres by four, and the graves are marked not by headstones in any conventional sense but by small stones set into the earth. A few metres to the south, four circular arrangements of similarly set stones, each about 1.9 metres across, may represent additional burials. The whole thing occupies a quiet corner of a much older structure, and the combination of the two, a prehistoric earthwork sheltering a post-medieval burial practice, gives the site an unusual layered quality.

Places like this are known in Irish as cillíní, informal burial grounds used for centuries to inter those who, under Catholic Church rules, could not be buried in consecrated ground. Unbaptised infants were the most common occupants, though suicides, strangers, and others considered marginal were sometimes buried in them too. The choice of a ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure originally built as a defended farmstead in the early medieval period, was not accidental. Ringforts and other prehistoric monuments were already understood as liminal, in-between places, belonging neither fully to the living world nor to the Church's sanctioned geography. They recurred as cillín sites across the country. At Slievefin, the graves themselves are modest almost to the point of invisibility, marked only by those small set stones, which is characteristic of the tradition; families buried here were often doing so quietly, outside official rites, with whatever markers came to hand.