It was set aside, as so many similar sites across Ireland were, for unbaptised children, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, who were excluded from consecrated ground and interred instead in liminal places at the edges of settled life. What makes this particular site unusual is that it may also be the final resting place of a group of Spanish sailors who drowned near the pier at Letterfrack, where their vessel had been delivering coal.

The ground itself measures roughly ten metres by nine, and is marked by around fifteen simple shale grave-markers, none rising much above thirty centimetres from the surface. Among them, one larger stone-lined feature, subrectangular in shape and measuring about two metres by one and a third, resembles what is known as a leacht, a low cairn-like monument sometimes associated with early Christian commemoration of the dead. Whether it predates the children's burials or belongs to the same tradition is unclear. The story of the Spanish sailors, preserved in local memory, adds a further layer of complexity to a place already layered with grief and quiet ceremony. The pier at Letterfrack was a working landing point, and the sea off this stretch of the Connemara coast has claimed more than one life over the generations. That foreign sailors should end up in a children's burial ground, rather than in the parish churchyard, speaks to the pragmatic kindness of communities who used such spaces for anyone who fell outside the formal structures of Catholic burial.