The slabs mark the graves of unbaptised infants, children who, under Catholic doctrine, could not be buried in consecrated ground and so were laid to rest in places that existed at the margins of both the living community and the Church's jurisdiction. This practice continued at Fehanagh until roughly a century ago, and the burial ground sits quietly within the enclosing bank of a rath, a ringfort of the early medieval period, its raised interior shaded now by deciduous trees.

The choice of a rath for such a burial ground was not accidental. These liminal infant cemeteries, known in Irish as cilliní, were frequently placed at the edges of settled land, in old earthworks, on townland boundaries, or near holy wells, spaces that carried a pre-Christian or ambiguous sacred character. The Fehanagh example occupies an elevated rectangular area measuring roughly twelve and a half metres north to south and just over six metres east to west, enclosed by the surviving lower courses of a stone and clay-mortar wall. The grave slabs are orientated north to south, following a consistent arrangement across the site. Beneath the surface, near the centre of the plot, lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval settlement, its presence a reminder that the ground here has been in use, in one form or another, for well over a thousand years. Dennehy, writing in 1997, records the burial ground's use for unbaptised infants as continuing into living memory, placing its last burials somewhere in the early twentieth century.

A farm road runs around the southern and eastern sides of the enclosure, which gives a sense of how closely this place is woven into everyday agricultural land. The graves themselves are unmarked beyond their upright slabs, so there is little to read in the conventional sense, but the uniformity of the stones and the stillness of the shaded interior do convey something of the quiet, unofficial sorrow that these places were built to hold.