There is no enclosing wall, no gate, no formal boundary of any kind, only an irregular grassy area roughly fifteen metres long and eight metres wide, scattered with small stones arranged in no obvious order. Some can be identified as head- and footstones, paired sentinels at either end of a burial, but many seem to have shifted or settled over time into something closer to randomness. Old hawthorns grow around the edges, which is typical of these places; the hawthorn was considered a threshold tree in Irish folk tradition, associated with the otherworld and with protection.

This is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used, from at least the medieval period into the twentieth century, for those who could not be interred in sanctified ground under Catholic Church rules. Unbaptised infants were the most common occupants, though stillborn children, and in some periods suicides and shipwreck victims, were also buried in these marginal spaces. The Church's position was that without baptism a soul could not enter heaven, and so the bodies of such children were kept separate from consecrated parish cemeteries. Families were left to find their own ground, often a liminal spot, a boundary between fields, a lakeshore slope, somewhere neither fully of the settled world nor entirely outside it. The result is that cilliní are found all across Ireland, frequently unrecorded and easily overlooked, their stones sinking gradually into grass.

The site at Cúil Na Ceártan sits within a landscape already layered with quiet drama, the waters of Derryclare Lake visible to the west. The haphazard arrangement of the stones, the absence of any wall, and the ring of hawthorns give it the quality of a place that has been deliberately left alone rather than simply forgotten.