A children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, once occupied the northern half of a ring-barrow on this site. A ring-barrow is a low circular earthwork, typically of prehistoric origin, defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch. Such monuments were frequently reused in later centuries as burial places for unbaptised infants, who were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice and so interred instead in liminal spaces, ancient earthworks among them. That overlap of prehistoric monument and post-medieval folk practice is not unusual across Ireland, but it gives these places a particular kind of layered silence.

The barrow at Cloonteen carries the monument reference GA028-015---- and the children's burial ground was associated with its northern section. According to local information gathered for the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999, that portion of the monument has been levelled. No visible surface trace of the cillín survives today. The ground has been altered to the point where there is simply nothing left to see, only the knowledge, preserved in local memory and in print, that something once occupied this space.