Heavily overgrown and unenclosed, the area measures roughly seven and a half metres by five and a half, and within it sit about half a dozen small, grave-like marker stones. Local tradition identifies it as a children's burial ground.

Places like this are known in Irish as cilliní, informal burial sites used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, and sometimes also stillborn children, suicides, or strangers, all of whom were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic ecclesiastical law. They appear across the Irish landscape in their hundreds, often in marginal locations, on hillsides, at field boundaries, near ancient monuments, or on the edges of bogs. The choice of a narrow terrace on a hillside, set apart from the parish churchyard, fits a pattern repeated in townlands throughout Connacht and beyond. These were not neglected places in the eyes of those who used them; they were simply different, governed by a different kind of care and a quieter form of grief. The marker stones at Gortard, small and unelaborated, are typical of the form. No inscriptions, no formal memorials, just stones placed to mark where a child lay.

The site is unenclosed and overgrown, which means there is no boundary wall or formal entrance to orient a visitor. The hillock setting would make the ground difficult to approach without local knowledge of the precise location.