The site is known locally as a cillíneach, the Irish term for an informal children's burial ground, where unbaptised infants were interred in unconsecrated ground. For centuries, Catholic teaching held that children who died before baptism could not be buried in consecrated soil, and so families turned instead to liminal places, old earthworks, boundary ditches, and ring-forts, places already set apart from the everyday landscape. The choice of a rath here follows a pattern found across Ireland, where pre-Christian enclosures took on a quiet secondary life as sites of sorrowful, unofficial burial.

A rath, sometimes called a ring-fort, is a roughly circular earthen enclosure dating from the early medieval period, typically the remains of a defended farmstead. The one at Gortavallig shelters this cillíneach within its interior, which is now heavily overgrown. The graves are marked by plain, uninscribed upright stone slabs, most of them oriented roughly north to south. Some of the markers have fallen and lie partly buried beneath the thick vegetation. There are no inscriptions, no names, no dates; the stones record nothing beyond the fact of a burial, which was itself a private act, carried out quietly, often at night, by grieving families with nowhere else to turn.