The ground is unenclosed, meaning there is no wall or fence to separate it from the surrounding landscape, and yet the pattern of stones makes its purpose unmistakable. This kind of site is known in Ireland as a cillín, a place where unbaptised infants and sometimes others who were excluded from consecrated ground were buried outside the formal rites of the Church. Hundreds of such sites survive across the country, quiet and largely overlooked.

This particular burial ground is small, measuring roughly twelve metres in length and just over seven metres in width, and the graves within it are aligned on an ESE-WNW axis. What gives the site an additional layer of interest is its position directly to the south of a rath, the raised earthwork of an early medieval ringfort. Raths were enclosed farmsteads, typically dating from the period between the sixth and tenth centuries, and the land around them was often regarded in later folk tradition as charged or liminal in some way. The proximity of the children's burial ground to this older monument is unlikely to be accidental. In many parts of Ireland, cilliní were deliberately placed near prehistoric or early medieval earthworks, perhaps because such places were already understood to sit at the edge of ordinary social and religious categories.