The site was a cillíneach, the Irish term for a children's burial ground, typically used in post-medieval and early modern Ireland for unbaptised infants who, under Catholic doctrine of the period, could not be interred in consecrated ground. These small, informal cemeteries were often placed in liminal or ancient locations, and this one was no different: it occupied an area within a rath, the remains of a circular earthen enclosure dating from the early medieval period, most commonly associated with farmsteads of the first millennium AD.

The cillíneach at Derrycreeveen is known today only through local memory. At some point the rath itself was levelled, and the burial ground was destroyed along with it. No physical trace remains. What does survive is a cross-inscribed stone, standing roughly twenty metres to the south-east of where the rath once was. The relationship between the stone and the burial ground is not spelled out, but its proximity is unlikely to be coincidental. Cross-inscribed stones of this kind were often placed at or near sites of religious or funerary significance, serving as quiet markers in a landscape that otherwise kept no visible record of what had happened there.

There is nothing to see at the burial ground itself, and that absence is in some ways the point. The levelling of the rath removed any surface evidence, leaving only the cross-inscribed stone nearby as a tangible remnant. For those who know what to look for, and where, the stone remains standing in the field.