There are no headstones here, no inscriptions, no visible graves at all. Yet this is a burial ground, one of hundreds of similar sites found across Ireland and known as cillíní, places set apart from consecrated churchyards and used, often in secret or at least in silence, for the interment of unbaptised infants.

The practice of burying children who died before baptism in unconsecrated ground persisted in Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century. Catholic doctrine once held that such infants could not enter heaven, and so they were excluded from the parish graveyard. Instead, families buried them in liminal spaces: old ringfort banks, the margins of fields, coastal strands, and sites like this one at Killacolla, which carry no official religious designation but were understood locally to be sacred in their own way. The site itself is a roughly circular platform measuring approximately 9.5 metres across in both directions, north to south and east to west. A scarped edge, a low cut or drop in the ground of around 0.7 metres and some 6 metres wide, defines the boundary on the northwest to northeast arc and again from the east around to the southwest, forming a raised, level surface. The northeast to east and southwest to northwest sections lack this defining edge, giving the enclosure an incomplete, organic quality. Denis Power compiled the record of the site, which was uploaded in August 2011.

The site lies in wooded ground behind a farmyard, and its interior is densely overgrown with trees and bushes, which makes it easy to pass without noticing and difficult to read clearly once you are standing in it. The loose stones strewn across the interior surface may mark burials, or may simply have accumulated over time; no individual grave markers are identifiable. Visiting such places calls for a degree of discretion, as they often sit on private farmland and carry a weight of local memory that is not always visible to the outside eye. If you do locate it, the circular earthwork itself, whatever its precise origins, is the thing worth examining, tracing the scarped edge where it survives and considering how deliberately this level platform was created and maintained across what may be several centuries of quiet, unofficial use.