No headstones remain, no mounds, no visible markings of any kind. The site belongs to a tradition of cillíní, informal burial grounds used in Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, and it carries the particular quality of erasure that defines such places: known to have existed, impossible now to read from the surface.

The ringfort itself, a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, was a commonplace unit of early medieval rural settlement in Ireland, thousands of which survive across the country in varying states of preservation. That this one was repurposed for burial is noted by Neary, writing in 1914, who recorded that it had formerly served as a burial ground and was by that point already thickly planted with trees or vegetation. Even in 1914, then, the funerary use was in the past tense. The convergence of ringfort and cillín is not unusual; such pre-Christian or liminal enclosures were sometimes chosen precisely because they stood outside the jurisdiction of the parish church, occupying an older, ambiguous sacred geography. In Carrowntryla, whatever that geography once held has been entirely absorbed by time and growth.