The small, irregular boulders scattered across this unenclosed patch of ground mark the graves of children who, under the theological conventions that held sway in Catholic Ireland for centuries, could not be interred in consecrated ground. Unbaptised infants were believed to be excluded from heaven, and so they were laid to rest instead in liminal places: old earthworks, boundaries, the margins of the parish. These sites are known in Irish as cillíní, and they carry a particular quietness that ordinary graveyards rarely have.

What makes the Cloonmore site especially layered is its setting. The burial ground occupies the interior of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating to the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, built from a circular bank and ditch to define a family's territory and protect their livestock. Such structures were already ancient and mysterious to later generations of Irish people, associated with the supernatural and with the aos sí, the spirit world. Choosing these liminal, already-charged places to bury unbaptised children was not random; it reflected a folk belief that the boundary between the human world and the otherworld offered some form of shelter or passage for souls in an ambiguous state. The Cloonmore site was recorded by O'Flanagan in 1927, who noted the irregularly shaped, unenclosed area measuring roughly 16.9 metres north to south and 11 metres northeast to southwest, with a number of small, randomly placed boulder grave-markers scattered across it.

The boulders themselves are not inscribed or shaped; they are simply stones, placed by hand over small bodies, in no particular order. That randomness is part of what gives the site its character. There are no rows, no symmetry, none of the organising logic of a formal graveyard. Each stone sits where someone placed it, quickly, quietly, outside the rites that governed everything else.