A cross has been cut into the bark to mark the site's use as a children's burial ground, one of the informal, unconsecrated burial places known in Irish as cillíní, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial were interred, sometimes well into the twentieth century. At the base of the oak, partly embedded in the ground, sits a small granite bullaun stone flecked with quartz inclusions. A bullaun is a rock with one or more deliberately hollowed depressions, often associated with early ecclesiastical sites and sometimes said to hold rainwater with curative or sacred properties. This one closely resembles examples known from the nearby townland of Carrigagown North, raising the possibility that it was moved here from an earlier site.

The monument, which measures roughly six metres in diameter and stands about sixty centimetres above the surrounding pasture, sits atop a low rock outcrop with a stream running immediately to its west. Locally it has long been called the Fairy Rath of Mota, and the name itself carries archaeological weight: a rath or cashel is a stone or earthen ringfort, and the circular form with low projecting orthostats does suggest the remains of one, perhaps later repurposed first as a church site and then as a burial ground for children. In 1937, as part of a national schools folklore collection, a pupil named Moira Carroll from Killadangan National School recorded the community's understanding of the site, including the belief that Mass had been said there during the Penal Laws, when Catholic worship was suppressed and congregations gathered in secret at outdoor locations. Carroll also recorded a folktale, already old by then, about a humpbacked man called Paddy the Nailer who passed the rath one evening and heard music from within. He whistled the tune so well that the fairy king had his hump removed as a reward. A second man, Mick Kane, less gifted as a whistler, tried the same and ruined the tune entirely; the fairies punished him by adding Paddy's old hump to his own. Carroll noted that the old people of the district vouched for the story, as their parents had known Mick Kane with his two humps. A second account, collected by Margaret Starr of Lisquillibeen from the same period, described the fort as circular, walled, with an arched entrance, and still inhabited by the fairy folk according to those living nearby.