And yet local knowledge holds firmly that this is a children's burial ground, a place set apart from consecrated ground for the interment of unbaptised infants, a practice that was widespread across Ireland for centuries and only formally discouraged in the twentieth.

The site sits in the corner of a field overlooking Trawatober to the south, close enough to the sea that the two landscapes are almost continuous. It measures roughly 32 metres on its longer axis, running north-north-east to south-south-west, and about 11 metres across. The boundary is low-key and partial: a drystone field wall defines the western and southern edges, while a handful of small earthfast rocks, stones set naturally or deliberately into the ground, mark the eastern and northern limits at wide intervals. Immediately to the west, on the far side of a boithrín, the small lane that connects field to field across this kind of Atlantic landscape, lies St Columbkille's Burial Ground, the parish cemetery proper. The two sites are neighbours, but their histories are entirely separate. Children's burial grounds of this type, sometimes called cillíní in Irish, were places outside the formal bounds of the Church where families quietly laid infants who had died without baptism. Because such children were not considered eligible for consecrated ground under Catholic teaching, communities established their own alternatives, often at liminal spots: townland boundaries, old ringfort interiors, or, as here, the edge of the land where it meets the sea.