No names, no dates, no epitaphs. The rough stone slabs set upright within the enclosure mark graves that were never meant to carry text, because the people buried here were never formally named in the eyes of the Church. This was, by the early twentieth century, a place reserved solely for unbaptised children, those infants who died before receiving the sacrament and who, under Catholic doctrine of the period, could not be interred in consecrated ground alongside the baptised.

The site is known as Cill Chuain, an Irish place name pointing to an early ecclesiastical foundation, and there was once a church standing within the graveyard itself. By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled, the place had already fallen out of general use. The construction of a new Catholic church nearby drew the local population away, and as one correspondent noted at the time, the people simply preferred to take their last rest beside the newer building. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan recorded that the graveyard had by then been reduced to a single function, the quiet, unofficial burial of unbaptised infants. The physical boundary of the enclosure is itself uncertain; a short earthen bank, little more than thirty centimetres high and running westward from the northern edge of the eastern side, may once have defined the perimeter, and it appears as a dashed line on the second edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1899, suggesting even the cartographers were unsure of its extent.

The graveyard sits at the southern end of a small field, widening slightly towards the north, its dimensions modest by any measure. The rough upright slabs within it are unmarked, which is consistent with the informal and largely unacknowledged nature of these burials across rural Ireland. Places like this, sometimes called cilliní, were used for centuries to inter those considered outside the full rites of the Church, and they tend to occupy marginal ground, edges of fields, old ecclesiastical sites, or elevated spots slightly apart from the main settlement. The plateau above the river confluence at Coan fits that pattern precisely.