What marks this ground out is precisely its invisibility: by 1881, an observer could only tell it apart from the surrounding fields by a scatter of moss-covered rough stones. That same account, recorded by Grove White, described it as long disused. It is a cillín, a type of unconsecrated burial ground found across Ireland, reserved in this case for the interment of unbaptised children, who, under Catholic practice of the period, could not be buried in consecrated ground. Caulfield, writing in 1882, confirmed that this was the cemetery's sole recorded purpose.

The graveyard sits within an early ecclesiastical enclosure, with the ruined parish church of Kilmaclenine forming its northern boundary. The enclosure itself belongs to a wider landscape of layered abandonment: immediately to the west lies the footprint of a deserted rural borough, a planned medieval settlement that never fully took hold or was subsequently emptied out. The graveyard's own boundaries have shifted and contracted over time in a way the old Ordnance Survey maps make legible. The 1842 six-inch map shows a substantial rectangular area, roughly fifty metres by forty, enclosed on three sides by field fencing. By 1905 and again in 1937, the mapped area had shrunk considerably, to something closer to fifteen metres by twenty, huddled to the south and east of the church ruin. On the ground today, the subrectangular plot measures around twenty-five metres east to west and fifteen and a half metres north to south, delimited by a low earthen and stone bank to the east, a shallow fosse, or ditch, to the south, and an earthen field boundary to the west. Not a single grave marker remains visible.