At Ower in County Galway, a burial ground once occupied the northern side of a road running east to west along an esker, one of those long, winding ridges of gravel and sand deposited by glacial meltwater streams across the Irish midlands and west. The esker would have made the road a natural route through otherwise boggy terrain, and someone, at some point, chose the ground beside it for the dead. Today, nothing visible remains at the surface.

The site's paper trail is thin but telling. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey mapped it as a roughly L-shaped unenclosed area, noted simply as "Graveyard", with no wall or boundary marking it off from the surrounding land. By the time the third edition was produced in 1933, it had apparently been enclosed, appearing as an irregular plot roughly thirty metres across, and was recorded as a cillin, or children's burial ground. A cillin, sometimes also spelled cillín, was a marginal burial place used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice; they are found across Ireland, often at old boundaries, beside water, or on slightly elevated ground. The proximity of a holy well, lying roughly a hundred and eighty metres to the west, fits a pattern common to such sites, where sacred water and sacred ground tend to cluster together. Whatever enclosure existed by 1933 has since disappeared, and the graveyard itself has left no trace a visitor could point to.