These places, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for centuries to inter infants and unbaptised children who, under Catholic doctrine, could not be buried in consecrated ground. They are found across Ireland in quiet, marginal spots, and this one in Ballymoat is among the better-preserved examples: a rectangular enclosure running roughly 26 metres north to south and 7 metres east to west, defined by a scarp, with a narrow walkway running outside it and a drystone wall forming the outer boundary.

The grave-markers inside, aligned north to south, survive in considerable number. Three graves in the north-east section are particularly distinctive. One is marked by a flat undressed flagstone with two headstones set at its western end. A second is a rectangular grave edged with set stones. The third, also in the north-east corner and bordered by set stones, carries an inscribed graveslab dedicated to a child of three years old, dated 1827. That inscription is a rare thing in a cillín, where markers were often simple or absent entirely, and the specificity of it, a named child, a date, a grieving record cut into stone, gives the site an unusual legibility. Local tradition holds that the last burial here was that of an adult, whose inscribed tombstone bears the date 1875. That burial, by all accounts, was the reason the ground was subsequently closed. The departure from the site's intended purpose appears to have ended its use altogether.