This is a killeen, a term used across Ireland for informal cemeteries where unbaptised infants were buried, set apart from consecrated ground by theological convention that persisted well into the twentieth century. The exclusion had its own quiet geography: killeens were typically placed at liminal spots, on boundaries, at the edges of fields or on the margins of townlands, and this one at Clooncan sits at the south-eastern end of a ridge, defined partly by old field walls and partly by later concrete ones.

The enclosure is modest in its dimensions, roughly twenty and a half metres on its longer axis and twelve and a half on the shorter, covered in grass and bounded by those mixed walls on all four sides. Inside, three or four rows of small, plain stones are arranged in a north to south alignment. Each marker is approximately sixty centimetres long and only fifteen centimetres wide, rising no more than thirty centimetres from the ground. They carry no names. The survey of the site, conducted by Timoney in 1995, recorded their dimensions but not their number with certainty, which is in itself telling: these are graves that were never meant to be counted or commemorated in any formal sense, their occupants placed here in a space that was neither fully sacred nor fully secular, but somewhere uneasily between the two.