It sits quietly in pasture, defined on three sides by a low earthen scarp and on the fourth by an ordinary field fence, measuring roughly 34 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west. What makes it unusual is not its size or its setting but what it was used for: the burial of unbaptised children. These were infants who, under Catholic practice, were denied consecrated ground, and so were interred instead in liminal places, often old or unconsecrated enclosures, at the edges of parishes and communities. Such sites are found across Ireland and are known variously as cillíní or childrens' burial grounds, and Baunnanooneeny appears to have been one of them.

The site was recorded as a functioning grave yard on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and by 1905 and 1936 it had been marked as disused. The local antiquarian Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, noted its use for unbaptised children and also recorded a much stranger detail. He had been told of a blue elliptical stone, roughly the size of a mangel-wurzel, that was kept beneath a whitethorn tree somewhere within the enclosure. It was known as the Vanishing Stone, venerated as a relic of St Molaga, and was said to return to its position under the thorn tree no matter how many times it was moved. It was also believed to cure cattle. Grove White was never able to locate it himself, and it has not been found since. The association with St Molaga, an early medieval Irish saint with strong connections to north Cork, gives the site an older religious layer beneath its later use. There may also be the remains of a small church in the north-western corner of the enclosure, which would be consistent with an early ecclesiastical origin.