What makes this place quietly arresting is the layering of time it represents: a relatively recent burial practice carried out within the earthworks of a structure that predates it by well over a millennium.

The site occupies an irregularly shaped area of roughly eleven metres north to south and nine and a half metres northeast to southwest. Its enclosure is a patchwork of different boundaries from different eras. A low stone wall curves from the north around to the southeast; beyond that, the ancient bank of the ringfort itself, a circular or oval earthwork enclosure of early medieval origin typically used as a farmstead or place of refuge, serves as the southern boundary; and a Land Commission earthen field bank, the kind of boundary marker associated with the land redistribution schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, completes the enclosure from southwest back to north. Local information recorded around 1999 indicated that burials were still taking place here approximately fifty-five years prior, placing active use somewhere in the mid-twentieth century.

The children buried here were almost certainly unbaptised infants, interred in what the Irish tradition called a cillín, a practice rooted in the belief that those who died without baptism could not be buried in consecrated ground. Ringforts and other ancient earthworks were frequently chosen for such burials, perhaps because they already carried a sense of separation from the ordinary landscape, or because long-standing local custom had sanctioned their use. At Clashaganny, the repurposing of a structure already ancient when the practice began gives the site a particular kind of weight, with one marginalised burial tradition quietly inhabiting the remains of another era's everyday life.