The burial ground, known in Irish archaeology as a cillín, was a place set aside for unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground, a practice that continued in rural Ireland well into the twentieth century. What makes this particular site unusual is where it sits: not in a field corner or beside a ruin, but inside the interior of a medieval moated site.

Moated sites are rectangular or roughly square enclosures surrounded by a water-filled ditch, and they were typically built by Anglo-Norman settlers from the late twelfth century onwards as defended farmsteads. The one at Kilshanvy has survived only in part. Quarrying has completely destroyed the southern section of the earthwork, and it is within the remaining extant area that the children's burial ground is found. That surviving section measures roughly 31 metres east to west and 14.5 metres north to south, and across it numerous small set stones mark individual graves, each oriented north to south. The stones are modest, the kind that would pass unnoticed without knowing what they indicated, but taken together they map out a use of this ground that continued long after whoever built the moated enclosure had gone.