This is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial under Catholic canon law. The practice was widespread across rural Ireland for centuries, and these sites tend to sit apart from ordinary settlements, occupying marginal land in ways that reflect the ambiguous status assigned to the children interred within them.

The Derrykeel cillín measures approximately eighteen metres east to west and fourteen and a half metres north to south. It has no formal enclosure; its northern boundary is simply an existing field wall running east-north-east to west-south-west, with the pastureland continuing on either side. Numerous small set stones mark individual graves, running in roughly north-south rows, and there is also a large quantity of loose stones across the site. One substantial inscribed slab, just over a metre tall and half a metre wide, stands apart from the rest in both scale and legibility. It is dedicated to two infants of the Peirse family, one who died in 1806 and one in 1807, making it an unusually formal memorial for a place typically associated with anonymous, unmarked burial. According to local memory, the ground remained in use until around 1962, meaning it was still receiving burials well within living memory, long after Irish society had otherwise modernised around it. That continuity is itself worth pausing over: the cillín at Derrykeel was not some distant medieval survival but a functioning burial place during the lifetimes of people who are still alive today.