No stone marks the spot, no depression in the ground gives it away, and nothing visible at the surface survives to confirm the tradition. What remains is the local memory of it, attached to a monument that was already ancient when the burials are said to have taken place.

The site in question is a ringfort, the type of enclosed circular settlement, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, that was built in great numbers across Ireland during the early medieval period. Thousands survive around the country in varying states of preservation. Within this particular example at Ballywataire, local tradition holds that a children's burial ground occupied the eastern sector of the interior. These informal burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic canon law. They appear across Ireland in all manner of locations, from coastal strands to ancient earthworks, often chosen precisely because they stood outside the ordinary rhythms of parish life. The practice continued well into the twentieth century in some areas, and the grief attached to these places is frequently carried in oral tradition long after any physical evidence has disappeared.

At Ballywataire, that physical evidence is entirely gone. The tradition persists, but the ground keeps no outward sign of what it is said to contain. The ringfort itself remains, and the memory is held in the landscape rather than inscribed upon it.