On a steep south-west-facing slope above the Nier River in the Comeragh Mountains, there is an overgrown earthwork that local tradition associates with two of the more sorrowful categories of Irish rural life: the burial of unbaptised children, and the practice of Catholic worship during the Penal era. Neither use left much visible evidence, which is part of what makes the site quietly arresting. It appears on the 1925 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map but seems to have slipped from wider notice after that.

The earthwork is roughly subcircular, measuring about 25 metres north-east to south-west and 22 metres north-west to south-east. It is defined by a combination of a low field wall running south to north, an internal scarp, essentially a cut or step in the ground, rising to a maximum of 1.8 metres along the northern and eastern sides, and a shallower external scarp of about half a metre on the downslope, eastern to southern edge. The interior is raised at the southern end, with field stones still visible beneath the overgrowth. The Nier River runs roughly east to west some 70 metres to the south-west below. The association with a penal church is recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books, those nineteenth-century field notebooks in which surveyors gathered local placename lore and topographical detail. A penal church would typically have been an informal or makeshift place of Catholic worship used during the eighteenth century, when Catholic religious practice was legally curtailed. The further tradition of the site as a cillín, the informal burial ground for unbaptised infants who were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice, layers a second kind of marginality onto the place. Both uses point to a community working around official structures, religious and administrative, and leaving only the lightest physical mark in doing so.