It was set aside for children, and it continued to receive the dead as recently as the 1940s.

The site sits on an esker, one of the long sinuous ridges of sand and gravel deposited by meltwater streams beneath retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Such elevated, dry ground has attracted human activity in Ireland for millennia, and this particular spot was chosen for a purpose that was once common across the island: the burial of unbaptised infants. Known in Irish as a cillín (plural cilliní), these were informal, unconsecrated plots used for children who died before baptism and were therefore excluded, under the theology of the time, from burial in consecrated ground. The Patch site is unenclosed for the most part, an irregular area roughly 32 metres north to south and 12 metres east to west, with a field wall marking its western boundary. Inside, numerous stones set into the ground and aligned north to south mark graves that are themselves oriented east to west, the traditional Christian arrangement placing the head to the west. A single iron cross stands in the north-western quadrant of the site. Burials here are recorded up to the 1940s, suggesting the ground remained in active, if quiet, use well into living memory.