Stones protrude from the ground beneath the canopy, the characteristic surface signature of a cillín, the informal burial grounds where unbaptised infants were laid to rest across Ireland for centuries. Catholic doctrine long held that unbaptised children could not be interred in consecrated ground, and so communities found liminal spaces for them instead: shorelines, townland boundaries, and old ecclesiastical sites that carried a sense of sacred history without the formal sanction of the Church. The hillock at Cloghleigh is one such place.

The site sits within a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary, often defined by an earthen bank or wall, that typically surrounded an early medieval church and its associated ground. Writing in 1852 to 1853, a recorder named Cooke noted that a considerable quantity of human bones had been uncovered within what was already described at that point as a destroyed enclosure. The burial ground occupies the highest point of the hillock, enclosed by its ring of trees, and the protruding stones suggest burials that were never formally marked but were never entirely forgotten either. The layering here is worth pausing over: a children's burial ground, within an ecclesiastical enclosure, the enclosure itself already ruined by the mid-nineteenth century, all of it compressed into a single small rise in the North Tipperary landscape.