It is not a graveyard in the familiar sense. It is something more specific and, to modern eyes, quietly affecting: a dedicated place set apart for the smallest of the dead, positioned near the island's centre within what may be the earthworks of a ringfort, the circular enclosed settlements that were the dominant form of rural habitation in early medieval Ireland.

Excavations carried out in 1972 and 1973 revealed that the enclosure was built in two distinct phases. The earliest version consisted of an earthen bank and a fosse, the term for the ditch typically cut alongside such a bank, and this was later replaced or reinforced by a dry-stone wall, built without mortar, with traces of stone paving running along its inner face. The narrow entrance, less than a metre wide, was noted by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1916, with jambstones still partially in place on either side. What made the excavation findings particularly striking was the consistency of the burial practice: in most of the infant graves, someone had placed a small collection of quartz pebbles and a single elongated stone. The reasons for this are not recorded, but quartz has a long association in Irish tradition with sacred and liminal spaces. Inside the enclosure stood a small cell or church, and a large sandstone block served as a penitential station, a fixed point where pilgrims would pause to pray during the rounds, the structured circuits of prayer that were central to Irish pilgrimage practice. Inis Cealtra attracted pilgrims for centuries, and this enclosure, whatever its origins, was woven into that devotional landscape.

Today the area is heavily overgrown, and the enclosure itself is largely indistinct. The sandstone penitential station remains the one visible feature, a weathered marker in a space that has otherwise been reclaimed by grass and growth.