They are easy to miss, and in a sense that is the whole point. These stones are believed to be displaced grave-markers from a children's burial ground, a site whose quiet disorder speaks to centuries of practice that sat at the edges of official religious life.

The enclosure in question is a rath, a type of circular earthwork common across Ireland, typically built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead. It is unusual, though not entirely without precedent, to find a burial ground established within one. The practice of burying unbaptised children in liminal or unconsecrated spaces, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, arose from the belief that those who died without baptism could not be interred in hallowed ground. Raths, with their air of antiquity and separation from the everyday landscape, were sometimes chosen for this purpose, places that existed slightly apart. At Carrowreagh, whatever order the grave-markers once held has long since been lost; they survive only as loose stones, their inscriptions, if they ever had any, absent entirely.