Its boundary is partly a modern field wall and partly the low remnant foundations of an older rubble enclosure, with a break on the eastern side marking what was once an entrance. Inside, small fieldstones set upright in the earth serve as grave-markers, their alignment running east to west in the manner of Christian burial. A single mature hawthorn grows near the centre. There are no inscribed headstones, no family names, almost no record at all.

This is a cillin, the Irish term for a burial place used for unbaptised infants, children who, under Catholic doctrine, could not be interred in consecrated ground. Such sites are found across Ireland, often at liminal places on the edges of townlands, beside old boundaries or running water. Kilnabasty is unusual in two respects. Local tradition holds that on at least one occasion an adult male was buried here alongside the children, an anomaly that sets it apart from the typical cillin. More striking still is the suggestion, advanced by researcher O'Sullivan in 2009, that the site may originally have served as the burial ground attached to Loughrea's medieval leper hospital. If that connection is accurate, the ground may have been receiving the marginalised dead long before it became a place for unbaptised infants, its function shifting over centuries while its essential character, a burial place for those excluded from ordinary rites, remained the same. The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, surveyed in 1838, names it simply "Kilnabasty Grave Yard"; a later edition added the qualifier "Children's Burial Ground", encoding at least part of its story in cartographic shorthand.

In 2007 a commemorative stone was erected at the site following the excavation of a small test-pit nearby, which yielded nothing. The inscription reads: "St Laurence's Fields of the Innocents" and records the stone as a memorial to "the unrecorded generations of infants who were buried at this place from medieval times until the early twentieth century." The phrase "unrecorded generations" is precise in its honesty. The fieldstones marking the graves carry no names, and the children beneath them left no other trace.