These burial places, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used for centuries across Ireland to inter infants who died before baptism, since Church law long excluded them from formal Christian burial. What marks Killaloonty out is how recently it was still in use: local information holds that the last burial here took place sometime in the 1980s or 1990s, making it far less remote in time than its mossy stones might suggest.

The site sits in the south-eastern quadrant of what appears to have been an early ecclesiastical enclosure, its boundaries partly defined by the fosse, a defensive or enclosing ditch, of that older structure running from east to south. The western and northern edges are marked by a line of boulders. The plot itself measures roughly 35 metres by 20 metres, as recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1927. The grave-markers are small, undressed boulders, covered in moss and oriented east to west in keeping with Christian burial tradition. Among them, in the northern part of the plot, stands a wrought iron cross about a metre tall, its terminals and centre decorated with hearts, a detail that speaks to the particular tenderness with which these otherwise marginalised burials were sometimes treated. The south-western portion of the ground is now obscured by trees.

The iron cross, modest in scale but carefully wrought, is the most immediately legible thing on the site. The boulders require a slower kind of attention; aligned in rows but irregular in size, they could easily be read as scattered field stones were it not for their orientation and their context within the raised, bounded ground.