Known locally as a cillín, a term for these unofficial burial grounds that existed outside the consecrated boundaries of parish cemeteries, the site at Gowlaunlee measures roughly twelve metres on each side and is enclosed by a slight earthen bank. Within it, small set boulders mark what are almost certainly individual graves, and the footprint of a rectangular stone structure, about two and a half metres long and just over a metre wide, survives at foundation level.

Cilliní are found across Ireland, but their prevalence in the west is particularly marked. For centuries, Catholic doctrine held that unbaptised infants could not be buried in holy ground, leaving families to inter their children in liminal spaces: old ringforts, shorelines, field boundaries, and plots like this one, set apart from but not entirely disconnected from the living community. The Gowlaunlee site lies roughly 250 metres north-west of a ringfort, a relationship that is not accidental. Ringforts, the remains of early medieval farmsteads enclosed by earthen or stone banks, were already ancient and ambiguous places by the time these burial practices became common, and many communities across Ireland chose them, or their margins, as appropriate ground for children who occupied an equally ambiguous space between the living and the fully sanctified dead. The small rectangular structure within the enclosure may have served a commemorative or sheltering function, though its precise purpose is not recorded.