These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for centuries to inter infants who had died before receiving baptism, and who were therefore excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic doctrine. Because they existed outside the formal rites of the Church, cillíní were typically placed at liminal locations, old boundaries, shorelines, or, as here, within the earthworks of an ancient ringfort. The fact that the stones at Clerhaun are described as haphazardly arranged rather than set in any formal pattern is characteristic of these sites; grief was present, but ceremony was not.

The ringfort in which this burial ground sits is a separate, earlier structure, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, typically circular and defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The presence of a cillín within such a monument is not unusual. Ringforts were long associated in local tradition with the otherworld and with the Tuatha Dé Danann, which may have made them feel like appropriate, if unofficial, resting places for children considered to occupy their own ambiguous spiritual territory. The burial ground at Clerhaun is subrectangular in shape, measuring roughly 14.4 metres northwest to southeast and 9.8 metres northeast to southwest. Whitethorn bushes, the hawthorn, grow nearby; the tree has deep associations in Irish tradition with fairy ground and with places considered neither fully of this world nor the next.

The site is described as being in fair condition, with the small stones still visible among the grass and moss. It is an unenclosed space, meaning there is no wall or ditch marking it off from the surrounding ringfort, which makes it easy to pass through without recognising what you are standing in. The quietness of sites like this one is part of what they are.