They are grave-markers, and the ground they stand in is a children's burial place, a site of the kind once found quietly tucked across rural Ireland, away from consecrated churchyards and the rites that went with them.

These sites are known in Irish tradition as cilliní, informal burial grounds used for infants who died before baptism and were therefore excluded, under Catholic teaching, from burial in hallowed ground. Parents and communities found other places, and old, pre-Christian enclosures were frequently chosen, perhaps because they already carried a sense of remove from ordinary life, or perhaps simply because the ground was unconsecrated and therefore available. The ringfort here, a roughly circular enclosure of the type built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, formed the boundary within which this small mound, measuring approximately nine metres along its longer axis and six and a half metres across, came to serve that purpose. Only a few set stones remain to mark individual graves, placed without obvious order, which is characteristic of sites like this where formal memorial was never really the point.