Some of those stones are squared off and carefully worked, suggesting that whoever laid them out did so with deliberate care, even for a burial place that existed largely outside the formal reach of the Church.

The site is what is known in Ireland as a cillín, a type of informal burial ground used for centuries to inter those who could not be interred in consecrated ground, most often unbaptised infants, but sometimes stillborns, strangers, or suicides. Canon law held that the unbaptised could not receive a Christian burial, and so communities found their own quiet solutions, often in liminal or ancient places, at townland boundaries, beside ruins, or, as here, within the remains of a cashel. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a form of early medieval enclosed settlement common across the west of Ireland, and the decision to place this cillín inside one would not have been accidental. Such places already carried an air of age and otherness, set apart from everyday use. The plot at Ballywinna measures roughly twenty metres along its longer axis and just under twelve metres across, a modest but clearly defined space. McCaffrey recorded it in 1952, cataloguing it among a broader survey of similar sites in the region.