A rath is a circular earthwork enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and built as a farmstead or defended residence. At some point, long after its domestic use had ended, this one became a place for burying unbaptised children, a practice with deep roots in Irish folk belief and Catholic tradition. Children who died without baptism were refused burial in consecrated ground, and so communities quietly interred them in liminal places, often ancient earthworks, field boundaries, or coastal strands, sites that existed outside ordinary social and religious order.

The burial ground at Ballyhar was recorded in the 1840s, placing it in that era of systematic local documentation that accompanied the Ordnance Survey of Ireland. The record placed it close to two other raths in the same townland, and the most likely candidate is a rath situated roughly 200 metres east of one neighbouring enclosure and about 170 metres southeast of another. The clustering of three raths in such proximity is itself unusual, and the choice of one of them for infant burial, rather than any other local landmark, suggests a community understanding of these ancient earthworks as set apart from everyday life, belonging neither entirely to the living nor the dead.

Nothing visible now marks the interior of the rath as a burial place. There are no grave-markers, no stones, no depressions in the ground that a visitor could readily identify. The site persists in the record rather than in the landscape, a place known largely because someone thought to write it down at a particular moment in the nineteenth century.