It appeared on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map simply as 'Grave Yard', and by the 1930 edition had been relabelled 'Children's Burial Gd.', a label that tells most of its story. The 1838 OS Name Books describe it plainly as a graveyard for stillborn and unbaptised babies, and local tradition holds that it remained in use as such until the mid-twentieth century. It was also said to have received Famine burials.

When the N26 road required realignment in 2003, the site was fully excavated. What emerged was considerably more layered than the overgrown rectangle inspected just seven years earlier. Beneath one hundred stone grave settings, arranged in loose rectangular outlines with large flat stones marking head and foot, lay the skeletal remains of 181 children and adolescents; 147 of them were infants under two years old, and three pairs of twins were identified among them. Some had been placed in small wooden coffins, the timber long since rotted, their former existence detectable only through iron nails left in the soil. Twenty-seven burials were accompanied by shroud pins of copper wire. Below this layer of children's graves lay an entirely separate, earlier burial ground, established in the late fifteenth century, in which no infants appeared. A leacht, a small stone-built altar-like structure used in devotional practice, had been constructed in the western half of the enclosure, predating its later use for children. The enclosing walls visible in 1996 most likely dated to the early nineteenth century and had been built one to two metres outside an older wall on a slightly different axis, quietly enlarging the space without erasing what came before. Following the excavation, the skeletal remains were reburied with full funeral rites in the parish graveyard at Ballynahaglish.