What marks it out is a barely perceptible rise and fall in the pasture, a subcircular earthwork roughly 42 metres from north to south and 37 metres from east to west, defined by a slight external scarp no more than 40 centimetres high. A field wall and hedge, running northwest to southeast and lined with mature bushes and trees, now cuts straight through the middle of it. Nothing here announces itself as a place of burial. That is precisely what makes it so quietly unsettling.

This is a cillin, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised children, and occasionally for others considered outside the rites of the Catholic Church, such as suicides or strangers of unknown faith. For centuries, such burials were excluded from consecrated ground, and communities established their own unofficial sites, often at ancient earthworks, field boundaries, or liminal places on the edges of parishes. The site at Rockvale was already known and named by the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1842, where it appears hachured and labelled as "Grave Yd. for Children." By the time the twenty-five-inch revision was published in 1897, the designation had softened into "Children's Burial Ground (Site of)", a phrasing that suggests even then the ground was beginning to pass out of active use and into memory. The site was formally recorded as a burial ground in 1996.

On the ground today, the enclosure is barely traceable. The scarp that defines most of its perimeter is modest, between 10 and 40 centimetres high, and at the southern side the land actually drops down into the enclosure rather than rising away from it. There are no visible grave markers of any kind. What a visitor encounters, if they find it at all, is a pastoral field with a slightly uneven surface and an old hedgerow running through it, the kind of place that looks unremarkable until you know what the map once said about it.