What is recorded is a name and a probable association, which is often all that survives of a cillín, the informal burial grounds used across Ireland for centuries to inter unbaptised children and others excluded from consecrated ground. These sites were rarely documented formally, their locations passed down through local memory rather than cartography, and they have a habit of slipping from the record entirely.

This particular ground is associated with Ardnabara Abbey, a site whose own remains are described as faint earthworks. By 1933, when the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, the burial ground was named but not clearly marked, a distinction that suggests the cartographers knew something was there without being able to fix its precise location. The most plausible position, based on what little survives above ground, is within one of two subdivisions still faintly legible in the earthwork remains of the abbey site itself. An abbey in this context likely refers to a medieval ecclesiastical enclosure rather than a large monastic complex, and the pairing of such a site with a children's burial ground follows a pattern found widely across the west of Ireland, where earlier sacred ground was quietly repurposed for those the Church would not formally bury.

The earthworks at Cappaghnanool are faint enough that the burial ground may now be entirely invisible at ground level. There is no confirmed surface trace, no marker to orientate a visitor, and no clear boundary separating the cillín from the broader abbey remains. What persists is the name, and the knowledge that somewhere within those low, ambiguous ridges in the Galway landscape, children were once quietly laid to rest.