The site is a cillín, a type of unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for burial in Church ground. Such places were frequently established at prehistoric earthworks, perhaps because the boundaries of the old world and the new felt suitably ambiguous, or simply because the land was already set apart.

The ringfort itself, known in Irish archaeology as a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, most likely dating to the early medieval period. These were domestic settlements in origin, farmsteads surrounded by protective banks, and they survive in their thousands across the Irish countryside. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded this particular one at six-inch scale in 1916, it was already marked as a children's burial ground, suggesting the site had been in use for some time before the map was made. Inside the western half of the rath's interior, low upright stones stand without inscription, their arrangement consistent with grave markers. A further detail complicates any simple reading of the place: a roughly rectangular setting of upright slabs, measuring approximately three metres along its longer axis, sits at the north-western end of the outermost bank. What exactly it marks is not certain, but it may indicate another burial, its purpose quietly unresolved.