No headstone, no enclosure, no hollow in the earth marks the spot. The site is recorded, located to within a few hundred metres, and yet it has effectively vanished back into the landscape.

This is a cillín, the Irish term for an informal burial ground used historically for unbaptised infants, and sometimes for others considered ineligible for consecrated ground, including suicides and strangers. Such sites are found across Ireland, often in liminal places: beside bogs, at field boundaries, near ancient earthworks, or, as here, in the vicinity of a holy well. The well at Cloonteen lies roughly 400 metres to the north-west. The burial ground itself occupies a gentle north-east-facing slope on a slight rise within a marshy area, a setting that, however modest, would have placed it just above the waterlogged ground. The choice of location near a holy well was unlikely to have been accidental. These wells carried pre-Christian and early Christian associations, and the proximity may have offered a form of spiritual proximity when formal church burial was closed off. No date of use is recorded for the Cloonteen site, and the absence of any surface trace means the ground holds its history entirely out of sight.