This is a calluragh, a children's burial ground, a category of site used across Ireland for the interment of unbaptised infants who, under Catholic doctrine as it was then understood, could not be buried in consecrated ground. The graves here are marked either by long thin slabs set upright, roughly half a metre tall, or by box-like kerbs of small stones on edge, each one enclosing a space barely a metre long, the dimensions themselves making plain who lies beneath.

The site has its origins well before its use as a children's burial ground. The enclosure contains the remains of an oratory, a second building that may be a church, and two possible hut sites, suggesting a much earlier ecclesiastical settlement. The name Teampall na Cluanach, meaning roughly the church of the meadow or pasture, reinforces that reading. What is particularly striking is how long the site remained in active use: children were still being interred here in the nineteenth century, according to the Ordnance Survey Name Books for Kilmalkedar parish, meaning the calluragh phase of the site overlapped with living memory. The enclosure itself, measuring just over forty metres north to south and thirty-two metres east to west internally, is defined by a combination of stone-and-earth banks and dry stone walling, the western wall in particular showing signs of considerable rebuilding, likely because it was later pressed into service as a field boundary. A now-disused field wall bisects the interior east to west, cutting across the earlier arrangement.

The enclosure sits on a WNW-facing slope with an open view towards Smerwick Harbour to the north-west, the same stretch of water that has witnessed its own share of darker Irish history. That geographical openness, combined with the modest scale of the grave markers and the long, layered history of the site moving from early Christian settlement to post-medieval burial ground to repurposed farmland boundary, gives Templenacloonagh an atmospheric density that is easy to underestimate from a distance.