Many of those stones appear to be burial markers, but what makes the site genuinely puzzling is another arrangement altogether: larger slabs set on their edges in two parallel lines, roughly three metres apart, running at least four stones deep on the west side and two on the east. These are not typical grave markers. They may instead be the remnants of a kerb, the kind of low stone border built around a prehistoric monument, suggesting that whatever lies beneath this ground has a longer and more layered story than a simple burial field.

Locally, the place is known as a ceallunach, an Irish term for an informal or unconsecrated burial ground, often associated with children, unbaptised infants, or those excluded for one reason or another from church cemeteries. Such sites are found across Ireland and carry a particular weight in rural memory, occupying a space that is neither fully sacred nor fully forgotten. The ceallunach at Derrynakilla measures approximately twenty metres north to south and thirteen metres east to west, an unassuming oval of ground that has clearly meant something to the community around it for a very long time. That attachment is still active: local residents have recently enclosed the site within a new stone wall, a quiet act of collective preservation on land otherwise given over to improved grazing.