Scattered across its uneven surface are stones that may once have served as grave-markers. The place looks, at a glance, like a forgotten field corner, but it was set apart long before living memory and given a name that left no ambiguity: it appears on the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map simply as "Children's Burial Ground".

Places like this were once found across Ireland, known in Irish as cillíní, and sometimes anglicised as killeens. They served as burial sites for unbaptised infants, who, under Catholic teaching of the period, could not be interred in consecrated ground. The site at Stagmount was used, according to local tradition, during the Famine years, when such burials would have been tragically frequent. That oral memory was still alive in the 1940s, when the site was recorded in the Schools Manuscript collection as lying in a field called Páirc an tSéipéil, on land belonging to a family named Houlihan. The field name itself, meaning roughly "the chapel field", points to an older sacred character: the same enclosure contains the remains of a possible early church, and a rath, a type of circular earthwork that was typically a farmstead enclosure in early medieval Ireland, lies approximately ninety metres to the north-north-east. The landscape around Stagmount, in other words, has been layered with human activity and meaning for well over a thousand years.

The site looks south towards the Paps of Dana, twin rounded hills long associated in folklore with the goddess Anu and with the Tuath Dé. Whether that alignment was ever deliberate is impossible to say, but standing at the edge of the briar-covered mound, the view gives the place an unexpected sense of orientation, a feeling that this quiet patch of pasture was always understood to occupy a particular position in the world.