They mark a cillín, the informal burial ground of a kind found across Ireland, typically used for unbaptised infants who, under Catholic tradition, could not be interred in consecrated ground. These sites were often tucked into liminal spaces, old earthworks, field boundaries, coastal margins, places that sat outside the ordinary rhythms of parish life.

The association between this cillín and the ringfort beside it is not accidental. Ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, carried a persistent supernatural charge in local memory long after they fell out of use. Known as fairy forts, they were rarely disturbed, which made their ditches and hollows quietly useful as burial places for those the Church would not formally receive. The Tobernaclug site was noted by Neary in 1914, and local knowledge at the time of later survey indicated that no burials had taken place there within the preceding fifty-five years, suggesting the ground had gradually passed out of active use, though the three markers remained.

The hollow itself is modest, barely four metres across, and easy to overlook within the broader earthwork of the ringfort. The grave-markers are small, in keeping with the understated character of cillíní generally, where formal commemoration was rarely possible and often not the point. What the site preserves is less a monument than a habit of care, one that persisted quietly at the edge of an ancient structure for reasons that were never recorded in any official account.