No names, no dates, no inscriptions of any kind. This is a killeen, the Irish term for a children's burial ground, where unbaptised infants were traditionally laid to rest outside consecrated ground. Catholic doctrine held, until relatively recently, that unbaptised children could not enter heaven, and so they were buried separately, often in liminal places, at the edges of fields, beside water, or within ancient earthworks.

The site at Treanoughtragh measures roughly twelve metres north to south and twenty-three metres east to west, and sits about half a metre above the surrounding pasture, giving it a subtle but distinct presence in the landscape. By the late nineteenth century it had already fallen out of use. The grave-markers, small and plain, are laid out in north-south rows across the raised ground, though many are now obscured by overgrowth. Scattered boulders share the space with them, and at the centre stands a single blackthorn bush, a tree long associated in Irish folklore with boundaries between the ordinary world and something else.

The site sits within poor pasture on the Iveragh Peninsula, that broad arm of land in south Kerry stretching out into the Atlantic. The combination of the waterside setting, the unmarked stones half-lost in vegetation, and the solitary thorn tree gives the place a quality that is harder to describe than it is to feel standing there.