What makes the site unusual is not just this layering of the dead, but what the older enclosure was once called: an Infants' Burial Ground, a phrase that points to a practice once widespread across Ireland.

Such sites, sometimes called cillíní, were used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic Church law. They occupy a particular and often melancholy corner of Irish social history, set apart from parish graveyards and frequently left unmarked. The Carrownskehaun example does not appear on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map at all, which suggests it was either overlooked by surveyors or considered too minor to record at that time. It does appear, named as an infants' burial ground, on the later 25-inch Ordnance Survey plan, described as a subrectangular enclosure measuring roughly 20 metres on its north-west to south-west axis and 35 metres north-east to south-west. By the 1915 six-inch edition it is recorded simply as "Burial Gd.", the earlier designation having quietly dropped away.

The physical traces that survive are fragmentary. The north-west and north-east walls of the modern rectangular graveyard appear to follow the original limits of the older enclosure, effectively preserving two of its sides within the newer structure. A low stony scarp, only about 0.3 metres high, may mark the south-east edge of the original ground. The south-west side has left no visible trace. Within the area corresponding to the older burial ground, late nineteenth and early twentieth century headstones of the Celtic cross type are still visible, their carved forms a later addition to a space that, for a long period, would have carried no markers at all.