Known in Irish as An Cheallúnach, and in anglicised form as Calluragh, the site belongs to a widespread but quietly sombre tradition in Irish rural life. A calluragh or cillín (the terms are sometimes used interchangeably) was a place set apart from consecrated ground, where infants who died before baptism were laid to rest. Catholic doctrine historically denied such children a place in consecrated cemeteries, and so communities designated their own liminal spaces, often ancient enclosures, cliff edges, or old pre-Christian boundaries, for these burials. The result was a geography of grief that ran parallel to the official landscape of the dead.

The enclosure here measures roughly 41.6 metres east to west and 34 metres north to south. Its southern and western sides are formed by field boundary fences, while the remaining perimeter is a low dry-stone wall, between 0.8 and 1 metre high. The northern half of the interior is level and largely featureless, but the south-eastern sector is uneven ground, occupied by amorphous low mounds. As late as the 1840s, a roughly circular area in the eastern corner, about 18 metres across, was still being used for the interment of children. That detail comes from the Ordnance Survey Name Books compiled during the primary triangulation of Ireland, documents that frequently captured living local practices just as they were beginning to fade. The 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region by J. Cuppage brought the site into the formal record, though the ground itself had long held its own kind of memory.