The site at Fountainhill is a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used historically for unbaptised infants, and occasionally for others deemed ineligible for burial in a churchyard. These places exist across Ireland in considerable numbers, often unmarked on maps and easy to walk past without any sense of what lies underfoot.

The site measures roughly 17 metres by 13.5 metres and has no enclosing wall or ditch, which itself sets it apart from many cillíní that occupy a former ringfort or a fenced corner of a field. Within this unenclosed rectangle, small set stones are still visible on the ground, some of them arranged to outline individual grave-plots. Those plots are modest in scale, ranging from about 1.1 to 2.2 metres in length and approximately 0.65 metres wide, oriented east to west in the same alignment used in Christian burial practice. The site sits around 25 metres north-west of the point where a townland boundary meets the shoreline, a marginal location that reflects the ambiguous status these burials carried. Liminal ground, neither fully inside nor outside the community, was a recurring choice for such places.

The theology behind cilліní was uncompromising by modern standards. Catholic doctrine held that unbaptised children could not enter heaven, and so they could not be buried alongside the baptised faithful. Families had little official recourse, and these quiet, informal plots became the practical answer. The grief they represent is straightforward enough, even if the stones marking them are not.