The mound, some twenty metres across, was excavated in 1938 just before rising reservoir waters permanently altered the landscape around it. Archaeologists recovered two small graveslabs, one cut into the shape of a cross, but found no bones. The excavator concluded that the soil's high acidity had dissolved them entirely, leaving the slabs as the only physical testimony to whoever had been interred there.

The site belongs to a tradition of burial grounds known in Irish as a cillín, or more locally here as the 'Reilig', a term broadly meaning burial place. These were plots set aside, often informally and outside consecrated ground, for those who could not be buried in a parish churchyard under Catholic practice, most commonly unbaptised infants. The association of such places with children gives this particular site its listed designation. Raftery's 1943 publication recorded the excavation, making it one of the earlier documented examples of such a site being investigated archaeologically rather than simply noted and left. That the excavation was prompted by the imminent flooding of the valley during reservoir construction adds a particular edge to the record; the landscape around Blessington was substantially reshaped in the late 1930s, and this mound was among the things examined before the waters closed in.

The mound is not visible at ground level today, but the local name has survived, which is often how such places persist in a community's knowledge long after the physical trace has faded. The two graveslabs recovered in 1938 came from a site that has since effectively been absorbed into the modern shoreline environment, leaving the name 'Reilig' as the most durable remnant of what was once marked, if quietly, in the ground.