No headstones, no visible mounds, no markers of any kind break the surface. The burial ground occupies the interior of what may be a rath, the circular earthwork enclosure associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and the combination of these two uses, one ancient and functional, one sorrowful and informal, gives the site a particular kind of quiet weight.

A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, was typically a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built and occupied roughly between the sixth and twelfth centuries. That their interiors were later repurposed as children's burial grounds is not unusual in Ireland. These sites, known as cillíní or killeens, were used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic ecclesiastical rules. The social and religious pressures that produced this practice were significant, and such burials often took place quietly, at the margins of the parish and the community. The Kilgarriff site is noted in the record by Aldridge in 1969, which places its documented recognition in the late twentieth century, though the burials themselves could be considerably older.