It measures roughly seven metres along its longest axis and rises only half a metre or so above the surrounding ground, its flat top scattered with low stones that push up unevenly through the sod. Nothing marks it out to a passing eye, and yet this modest earthen platform served a specific and quietly sorrowful purpose: according to local knowledge recorded in 2014, it was used as a burial place for unbaptised babies.

These sites are known in Irish as cillíní, singular cillín, and they are found across the country, often in marginal or liminal locations, at field boundaries, old ringfort interiors, or on slightly elevated ground. For centuries, Catholic doctrine held that infants who died before baptism could not be buried in consecrated ground, as they were considered to have died in original sin. Families who lost a newborn, or whose child was stillborn, were therefore compelled to bury them outside the parish churchyard, often quietly and without formal ceremony. The grief was real and the practice widespread, yet cillíní remained largely undocumented and unacknowledged in the official record for generations. The Gortnahurra mound fits this pattern closely, its slightly raised, trapezoidal form and randomly protruding stones consistent with the low-key, improvised character of such places elsewhere in the west of Ireland. To the south, Nephin Mountain is visible on the horizon, which gives the site a degree of openness despite the higher ground that closes in from the south-west.