Roughly ten metres across in either direction, its irregular boundaries are marked not by walls or railings but by grave markers alone, the kind of minimal definition that speaks to the circumstances of its use. Locally it is remembered as a famine burial ground, a category of site that appears across Ireland wherever communities were overwhelmed by death during the Great Famine of the 1840s and were left with little means or time for formal interment.

Famine burial grounds of this kind were often established outside consecrated churchyards, sometimes because of the sheer volume of deaths, sometimes because of the stigma or logistical impossibility of conventional burial during a period of catastrophic mortality. Many were on marginal or peripheral land, and few received any lasting physical commemoration. The one at Kilkinnikin is modest even by those standards: a roughly nine-metre plot worked into agricultural land, its presence preserved largely through local memory and the survival of its grave markers rather than through any formal designation or enclosure.