The stones are low, some barely rising above the grass, and the majority are threaded through with veins of quartz. Whether the quartz was selected deliberately, for some symbolic or ritual significance, or simply gathered from whatever was available nearby, is not recorded. What is known is that this was a cillin, the Irish term for a burial place reserved for unbaptised infants, children who under Catholic doctrine could not be interred in consecrated ground. These places are scattered across the Irish landscape, usually quiet and marginal, tucked into old boundaries or townland edges, and they were in use for far longer than most people now realise.

According to Dennehy, writing in 1997, the ground at Drombane was last used for this purpose roughly a century before that publication, placing the final burials somewhere around the late nineteenth century. The grave-markers are orientated north to south rather than the more conventional east to west alignment of Christian burial, a detail that quietly reinforces the sense of these children occupying a space apart. Dennehy also recorded an unusual box-like construction of boulders in the north-eastern quadrant of the burial ground, the purpose of which remains unclear. Beneath the ground, a souterrain runs within the burial area. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge. Its presence here, alongside a church site in the south-eastern half of the same enclosure, suggests the site has a long and layered history that reaches back well before its use as a childrens' burial ground.