There is no enclosing wall, no formal boundary, nothing to announce what it is. The markers sit haphazardly, and one of them, on its north face, carries a simple incised cross and the letters TOB, understood to refer to a member of the O'Brien family who once lived nearby.

This is a cillín, the Irish term for an informal burial ground used historically for those who could not, for various reasons, be interred in consecrated churchyards. Unbaptised infants were the most common occupants, excluded from Catholic burial rites under the theological doctrine that they existed in a state of limbo, neither redeemed nor damned. The social reality was correspondingly quiet and sorrowful: families buried their children in marginal ground, often at night, outside the structures of official religion. At Castlegar, local tradition holds that itinerant families used this particular site, and that the nocturnal nature of the burials was deliberate. One account, recorded by Claffey in 1983, describes a travelling family making the journey from Sligo specifically to bury a child here, suggesting the place carried some recognised, if unofficial, significance within a particular community.

What survives today is modest and easy to overlook: a slight rise in a field, a few stones that do not quite line up with anything. The inscribed marker with its cross and initials is the most legible trace of individual identity in a place that was, by its nature, kept away from record-keeping and ceremony.