A ringfort, one of the circular earthwork enclosures that were once the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, became, at some later point, a place of burial for children. This is not as uncommon as it might sound. Across Ireland, unconsecrated ground on the margins of settled life, old earthworks, boundaries, liminal spaces, was used for burying unbaptised infants, who under Catholic teaching could not be interred in consecrated cemeteries. These sites are known in Irish as cillíní, and they tend to share a quality of quietness and deliberate obscurity.

What survives at Gardenfield, recorded by Costello in 1903, is a scatter of small, unworked pieces of limestone set into the ground. The main concentration lies in the western sector of the ringfort's interior, covering a roughly rectangular area of about fifteen metres east to west and ten metres north to south. A few additional grave-markers sit closer to the southern bank of the enclosure. None of the stones appear to have been shaped or inscribed; they are markers in the plainest possible sense, small pieces of local limestone placed to indicate a presence rather than to name one. The restraint of the material is itself telling. These were burials conducted outside the formal apparatus of the Church, carried out by families who nonetheless wanted to mark where their children lay.