This is a cillín, a type of informal burial ground once common across Ireland, used for children who died unbaptised and were therefore, under older Catholic doctrine, denied burial in consecrated ground. The practice left behind dozens of such sites across the country, many of them unenclosed, unmarked on road signs, and easy to walk past without knowing what they are.

The site at Kilnabasty measures roughly ten metres by just under ten, an area not much larger than a modest room, defined not by walls or a boundary ditch but simply by the presence of the stones themselves. The haphazard arrangement of those markers is characteristic of cillíns generally: there was rarely a record kept, no headstones with names or dates, and burials could take place at any hour, quietly, without a priest. The proximity to a spring well is also a recurring feature of these sites. Holy wells and natural water sources carried their own pre-Christian and early Christian associations with protection, healing, and liminal transition, and the edges of such places were thought appropriate for those who occupied an ambiguous spiritual position in the eyes of the institutional church.