The mound is a court tomb, a type of Neolithic megalithic monument typically dating to around 4000 BCE, built by early farming communities for collective burial and ritual use. Millennia after its original purpose had been forgotten, it was put to use again, this time as a burial place for unbaptised infants, a practice that quietly continued into the early twentieth century.

The site's second life reflects a painful aspect of Irish Catholic tradition. Unbaptised children, considered by Church doctrine to have died outside a state of grace, were refused burial in consecrated ground. Their families turned instead to liminal places, old raths, lonely field corners, and ancient monuments like this one, places that existed somehow outside ordinary social and religious order. By 1930 the site was marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map with the plain designation 'Children's burial ground', suggesting it was recognised locally even as the burials themselves were ceasing. According to local information, the last interments here took place in the early twentieth century.

Today the tomb presents itself as a modest disruption in the pasture, stones and boulders pushing up through the turf of the mound, without any clearly defined graves visible at the surface. The two layers of use, Neolithic monument and informal infant cemetery, sit together without ceremony or marker, the ground keeping both sets of remains in much the same silence.