The stones mark graves, oriented east to west in the traditional Christian manner, yet the ground itself is unenclosed and unmarked by any formal monument. This is a cillín, a type of informal burial place found across Ireland where unbaptised infants, and sometimes others excluded from consecrated ground, were interred outside the boundaries of the official parish cemetery. Because Catholic doctrine long held that the unbaptised could not enter heaven, families had no access to the Church's burial rites, and so these quiet, marginal spaces, often at townland boundaries, on old raths, or near ancient monuments, became the only available ground.

The site at Skehanagh occupies a subrectangular area measuring roughly 19 metres east to west and 12.5 metres north to south. The concentration of small set stones suggests a significant number of burials within that modest footprint, though no headstones carry inscriptions and no records attach names to the graves. The lack of any enclosing wall is itself characteristic of the cillín tradition; these places were never meant to be official, and their ambiguous legal and spiritual status meant they were rarely formalised. They existed in the landscape rather than in the documentary record, known primarily to the families who used them and gradually half-forgotten as the practice faded through the twentieth century.