What draws attention now are the low orthostats, upright stone slabs, protruding from the surface of the mound and arranged in rough rows aligned on a north-north-east to south-south-west axis. The mound itself measures roughly 24 metres along its longer axis and just under 15 metres across. This is a killeen, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground reserved for unbaptised children, and the stones suggest it received burials across a considerable period of time.

Killeens occupy a particular and uncomfortable place in Irish social and religious history. Under Catholic teaching as it was understood and practised in rural Ireland, children who died before baptism could not be buried in consecrated ground, and so communities quietly maintained separate places for them, often at the margins of parishes, on ancient earthworks, or, as here, on natural features that already carried some sense of distinctiveness or elevation. The choice of this hillock, standing out from the flat valley floor against the backdrop of a mountainous region, would not have seemed arbitrary to the families who used it. The alignment of the orthostats in discernible rows suggests something more organised than hasty or clandestine disposal; people returned to this spot repeatedly, and some effort was made to mark and order the ground.