The effect is quiet and deliberate, the individual markers giving each burial a specificity that administrative records rarely do. Sixty-one of those boys died at the industrial school that once stood nearby, run by the Christian Brothers.

The graveyard opened around 1890 and is closely bound to the history of Letterfrack Industrial School, one of the Irish institutions later examined in detail by the Ryan Commission, which documented decades of physical and sexual abuse of children in State-funded reformatories and industrial schools. Industrial schools were residential institutions, funded by the State and run largely by religious orders, which housed children deemed neglected, destitute, or beyond parental control. Boys could be committed from a young age and were often kept until their mid-teens, receiving little formal education while performing agricultural and domestic labour. The graveyard was later restored as an act of remembrance, and a white concrete cross in its north-west section carries inscribed limestone plaques listing the names of those who died at the school, along with a prayer.

The site is enclosed by a low rubble stone wall with rendered gate piers and wrought-iron gates, and a pebbled pathway descends from the graveyard to the road, where a second matching boundary wall and gate mark the lower entrance. The names on the limestone plaques are the most arresting thing here, making legible what institutional records long kept obscure.