No names, no dates, no inscriptions of any kind. Ten small mounds, each averaging roughly two and a half metres in length, suggest the outlines of individual graves beneath the surface, but the identity of those buried here was never meant to be read from stone.

This is a cillín, the Irish term for an informal burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic doctrine, were excluded from consecrated ground. These sites appear across Ireland in their hundreds, often in liminal locations, at field boundaries, on hillsides, or near water, places that existed at the margins of the sanctioned world. The Black Valley cillín sits within a raised rectangular enclosure measuring fifteen metres north to south and nineteen metres east to west, bounded on three sides by modern field walls. According to local knowledge, it remained in use as a children's burial ground into the early twentieth century, which means some of the families who brought their infants here may have been remembered by people still living within living memory of the site's compilation in the 1990s.

The landscape around it is among the more remote in Munster, a deep glacial valley surrounded by the MacGillycuddy's Reeks, with little in the way of passing traffic even today. The boggy pasture in which the site sits is unassuming from a distance, the raised ground easy to overlook. The uninscribed markers are the quietest possible form of commemoration, and that silence is, in its way, the most informative thing about the place.