It was recorded not as a conventional graveyard or parish cemetery, but as a cillín, a category of burial site that tells a complicated and often sorrowful story about Irish rural communities and the children they could not always bury in consecrated ground.

A cillín, sometimes spelled cilliní, refers to an informal or unconsecrated burial place, most commonly associated with unbaptised infants, though they were also used for others considered ineligible for burial in a churchyard, including suicides and, in some periods, strangers. The Ballyman site enters the documentary record through the Ordnance Survey Letters of the 1830s, a remarkable collection of correspondence in which surveyors and scholars gathered local historical and antiquarian detail as Ireland was being mapped for the first time at large scale. The reference was later published in O'Flanagan's edited edition of those letters in 1927. The site was compiled and assessed more recently by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, with a revised record uploaded in July 2018.

Ballyman lies in the area between Enniskerry and Bray, in a landscape that shifts between suburban fringe and older field patterns. Anyone visiting with an interest in the site should bear in mind that cilliní are often unmarked or very subtly marked, and can appear as little more than a slight rise in a field or a patch of ground at a field boundary. They are places that reward careful observation rather than obvious signage, and they deserve a certain respectfulness in approach, given the nature of what they contain.