There are no names carved here, no dates, no epitaphs. The markers are almost deliberately anonymous, which is in keeping with what this place once was: a cillin, a burial ground for unbaptised infants, kept apart from consecrated ground by the theological conventions of its time.

Under Catholic practice as it operated for centuries in Ireland, children who died before baptism were considered ineligible for burial in parish graveyards. Families turned instead to liminal places, often ancient earthworks, field margins, or sites already associated with the old or the uncanny. The mound at Cloongawnagh is a subrectangular platform measuring roughly 13.7 metres on its longer axis and 10.6 metres across, raised by a scarp that reaches about half a metre at its north-east end and a full metre at the south-west. The north-west face is straight, but the remaining sides curve slightly outward, giving the whole structure a roughly D-shaped plan when viewed from above. Stones visible on the outer face of the scarp may be the remnants of earlier stone facing, suggesting the platform has some age to it beyond its use as a burial site. By 1838 it was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps simply as a burial ground; by the 1916 edition, the designation had been made more precise, naming it a children's burial ground. That shift in labelling, across nearly eighty years of mapping, traces something of how such places came to be understood and categorised over time.

One detail complicates the picture slightly. At the south-east end of the platform there is an inscribed horizontal slab marking the grave of an adult, a quiet anomaly in a place otherwise given over to the unnamed and the very young. Whether that burial reflects a later use of the site, or some older local arrangement, the notes do not say. The small stones scattered across the surface tell the rest of the story in their silence.