It measures roughly 24 metres north to south and 14 metres east to west, and at its north-eastern corner a depression about 8 metres across marks the centre of what was once a killeen, an informal burial ground reserved for unbaptised children. These sites, found across Ireland, occupy a quietly sorrowful niche in Irish Catholic practice: because unbaptised infants were considered outside the formal rites of the Church, they could not be buried in consecrated ground, and so families brought them instead to marginal places, often ancient or liminal, where the earth had its own kind of sanctity.

The townland name, Ardcanaght, derives from the Irish Aird Chánachta, meaning hill of the Tribute, and the site sits within the parish of Kilgarrylander, in the diocese of Ardfert and the barony of Trughanacmy. It was already old enough to be mapped by the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch edition in 1841, where it appears annotated as Killeen Old Burial Ground, shown as a rectangular area with a field boundary cutting across its eastern edge. That boundary, running north to south, had already divided the space from the surrounding pasture, and the uncultivated character of the ground remained visible in satellite imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, the raised area still distinguishable from the grazed field around it.