Numerous gravestones remain on the site, suggesting a place of sustained, if largely undocumented, use. It is the kind of ground that reads as ordinary farmland until the vegetation gives it away.

This is what the Irish tradition knew as a cillín, a consecrated or unconsecrated plot used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic canon law, were excluded from burial in churchyards. The designation on the 1842 map as a Children's Burial Ground is unusually direct; many such sites survive only in local memory or field names, never making it onto official cartography at all. The oval shape is characteristic, often reflecting a much older enclosure reused across generations, and the presence of multiple gravestones distinguishes Garrane from the many cillíní where burials were intentionally unmarked.