The headstones, low slabs no more than forty centimetres tall and each paired with a matching footstone, were never inscribed, and the several low mounds scattered among them bear no marker at all. This is the particular character of a killeen, a type of burial ground found across Ireland that was traditionally reserved for unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground. The word itself derives from the Irish "cillín", a diminutive of "cill", meaning church, and these sites occupy an ambiguous space, physically separate from the parish graveyard, quietly set apart from the sacramental landscape around them.

This particular killeen sits on a north-west-facing slope in rough pasture above the estuary of the Finnihy River, near Kenmare in south-west Kerry. The enclosure, roughly fifty metres along its longer axis, is defined in a piecemeal way: a drystone wall along part of the south-west edge, traces of a curving earthen bank elsewhere, and along the remaining sides little more than uneven ground and overgrowth. The north-west portion of the interior slopes steeply down towards the riverbank, and the graves there are shaded by coniferous trees. The rest of the ground is densely overgrown with bushes and ferns. The site was already established enough in name and use to be recorded as "Killeen Burial Gd." on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, where it appears as a rectangular area bounded on the south-west by a field boundary and on the other three sides by a broken line, the north-west edge curving slightly, suggesting the ground was understood as a distinct, if informal, place long before anyone thought to document it systematically.

The site is not signposted or managed, and the overgrowth that characterises much of the interior is part of what makes it legible as a killeen rather than a conventional graveyard. The uninscribed stones are easy to miss underfoot, and the unmarked mounds easier still. That anonymity is not neglect so much as the original condition of the place.