These sites, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, were reserved for those who could not be buried in consecrated ground, most often unbaptised infants. What makes the Carnaun example particularly layered is where it sits: not in open fields, but tucked into the north-eastern corner of a cashel, a type of circular dry-stone enclosure associated with early medieval settlement, and directly overlying the corner of an older house site beneath it. The living, the dead, and the much older dead are all folded into the same small space.

The burial ground is roughly rectangular, measuring about 25 metres north to south and nearly 23 metres east to west, and its southern edge is marked by a low stone wall that has long since grassed over. Within that boundary the ground is densely set with stones indicating graves, all aligned east to west in the traditional Christian manner. Four slab-lined graves are still clearly visible, each around 1.5 metres in length, marked at both ends with head- and foot-stones. Three of these lie towards the centre of the enclosure and one sits further north. The modest scale of the graves, roughly the length of a small child, is quietly telling. The site was recorded by Cody in 1989 and sits within a wider complex of earthworks that includes the cashel and the underlying house site, suggesting that this corner of Carnaun has been in more or less continuous human use across several distinct periods.