The enclosure is barely twenty-one metres long and six and a half metres wide, yet within that modest rectangle, numerous set stones mark graves oriented northwest to southeast, the traditional Christian alignment placing the dead to face the rising sun at the resurrection.

Sites like this are known in Ireland as cilliní, informal burial grounds used historically for unbaptised infants and others who were excluded from consecrated churchyards under Catholic ecclesiastical law. Because unbaptised children were considered to exist in a theological grey area, their families could not bury them in the parish graveyard, and so marginal places were chosen instead: old earthworks, townland boundaries, the edges of fields. Here at Derradda, the ground is associated with what may be a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead built during the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks. The bank of this possible rath forms the boundary of the burial ground from the southwest around to the north-northwest, with a roadside field wall completing the enclosure along the eastern side. The rath itself is described as very poorly preserved, so the association between the two features is tentative, but it follows a pattern seen elsewhere in Ireland, where children's burial grounds cluster around older, liminal earthworks whose age and ambiguity made them feel set apart from the ordinary landscape.

The graves, marked by set stones rather than inscribed headstones, give no names and no dates. The alignment of the burials suggests the site was used within a Christian framework, even if it sat outside the formal structures of the Church, a small, persistent contradiction that characterises these places across the country.