Children's burial grounds of this kind, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, occupy a peculiar and melancholy place in the landscape. Unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborn children, were historically excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice, and so communities created their own informal cemeteries at the margins, in liminal spots such as old ringfort interiors, coastal strands, or on the edges of townlands. The site at Gortnakilla follows the pattern: a quiet, largely forgotten enclosure holding the graves of children who could not be buried alongside the parish dead.

The ground is roughly rectangular, measuring about 19.5 metres north to south and 18.4 metres east to west, and is enclosed by a stony bank, though that bank is now poorly preserved. A stone-faced entrance gap, just 1.2 metres wide, opens on the western side. Inside, concentrated towards the north-west corner, are numerous lines of set stones marking graves oriented east to west, the traditional Christian alignment with the head to the west and the body facing east. The site is recorded in O'Flanagan's 1927 survey, which suggests it was at least broadly documented in the earlier twentieth century, though by that point it was likely already long out of active use. Today the interior is heavily overgrown with briars and bushes, which both obscures the full extent of the grave markers and, in its own way, preserves the site from disturbance.