There is no enclosing wall, no gate, no formal demarcation of any kind, just a concentration of small stones set into the earth, most of them low and unassuming, with occasional head- and foot-stones still legible at either end of a grave. The plots are oriented east to west, the traditional Christian arrangement, but the absence of any boundary or official churchyard structure places this site in a different category entirely.

Locally, the ground is known as Poll na bPéist, a name that carries its own strangeness, and the site has long been associated with two of the most marginal groups in Irish burial tradition. It is said that Famine victims were interred here, alongside children. The burial of children outside consecrated ground was common practice in Ireland well into the twentieth century, connected to the theological status of those who died unbaptised; such informal cemeteries are known as cilliní, and they occupy an ambiguous space between the sacred and the unconsecrated. Famine burial grounds similarly exist apart from the formal parish record, their locations often preserved only in local memory rather than in any official register. That both categories of the buried are remembered at this one modest patch of hillside ground says something about the weight of what happened here, and how long communities carried it.