No church stands nearby, no graveyard wall encloses it. Locally, people know it simply as a children's burial ground.

These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used across Ireland for centuries to inter those who could not, under Catholic Church practice, be buried in consecrated ground: unbaptised infants most commonly, but sometimes also stillborn children, women who died in childbirth, and occasionally travellers or suicides. The exclusion from consecrated burial had both theological and social dimensions, and families who found themselves in this position often turned to older, liminal places at the edges of fields, near ancient earthworks, or at parish boundaries. The Gortnacarriga site fits that pattern precisely, tucked into a field corner away from any formal ecclesiastical context. The grave markers that survive are enough to indicate the rectangular extent of the burial area, though the records do not describe their form or material in further detail.