No headstones, no earthworks, no trace on the surface of what lies, or once lay, beneath. The ground has been quarried, and whatever shape the place once held has been largely undone. Yet maps, old fieldwork, and a seventeenth-century survey conspire to suggest that this unremarkable corner of north Cork was once a cillin, an informal burial ground, typically used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, who were quietly interred in marginal or liminal spaces across the Irish countryside.

The site does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1905, which makes its eventual appearance on the 1935 edition all the more interesting. That later map shows a subcircular enclosure of roughly fifty metres in diameter in the south-west corner of a field, marked with a broken line and labelled simply as a cillin. A researcher named Power, writing in 1932, recorded something slightly different: an irregular earthen mound about a perch, roughly five metres, across, which he placed at the east end of a field on John Mahoney's farm. Whether Power and the cartographers were describing the same feature from different vantage points, or whether the quarrying had already begun to confuse matters, is not entirely clear. Power also proposed that a place called Kilcargah, visible on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, the ambitious mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned under Cromwellian administration to document Irish landholding, refers to this same site. If he is right, then the burial ground was already old enough by the 1650s to have acquired a name and a place on a regional map.