The visible traces of graves remain within it today, lending the site a stillness that sits somewhat apart from the ordinary landscape around it.

A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, built primarily during the early medieval period in Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead. Their interiors were domestic spaces, yet over the centuries many were absorbed into folklore as liminal or otherworldly places. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that a rath at Ballinloughaun came to serve a purpose outside the boundaries of official burial practice. Children who died without baptism were historically excluded from consecrated ground in Catholic Ireland, and so unofficial burial places, known in Irish as cillíní, were sought out at the margins: old earthworks, field boundaries, shorelines, and other spaces that occupied an ambiguous position between the sacred and the secular. Aldridge, writing in 1969, recorded that the interior of this particular rath was used for precisely this purpose, and the physical evidence of those interments remains visible on the ground.