It measures approximately 21 metres north to south and 23 metres east to west, its northern and eastern edges marked by a line of bushes, its interior uneven and overgrown in the way that long-undisturbed ground tends to become. That contrast, a working agricultural field on one side, this unkempt, quietly set-apart enclosure on the other, is characteristic of a particular kind of Irish burial place that exists in hundreds of locations across the country, yet rarely makes it onto any official map.

The site belongs to a tradition of informal burial grounds known in Irish as cillíní, places where, for centuries, unbaptised infants and others considered outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church were laid to rest. Because the Church denied such individuals burial in consecrated ground, communities created their own spaces, often at liminal locations, field edges, ancient earthworks, or places already carrying some sense of the sacred or the old. The Garrane site looks out northward over the Laune river estuary and Castlemaine Harbour, a broad, tidal landscape that would have been a significant geographical boundary for the communities living around it. Whether that outlook was incidental or quietly deliberate is impossible to say now, but it gives the place a particular quality of separateness, set apart from the field it sits within, and opening onto water and sky.