Yet this place, recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name Relicnapastia, was once a children's burial ground, the kind of quiet, unconsecrated ground known in Ireland as a cillín, where unbaptised infants and young children were laid to rest outside the formal boundaries of churchyard and Catholic rite. The field measures roughly 57 metres east to west and 49 metres north to south, sitting on a slight natural rise. Only aerial photography has revealed anything of what once existed here: a faint cropmark, the ghostly outline of a levelled enclosure barely legible from above.

The Ordnance Survey noted the site in 1837, describing it simply as a small field of triangular form. What lends the place an additional layer of significance is its immediate neighbour to the south-east. Carrick Cross served as a mass rock during the Penal Laws, the period from the late seventeenth into the eighteenth century when Catholic worship was suppressed under British legislation and priests celebrated Mass outdoors, often at large flat-topped stones in remote or elevated spots. The proximity of the two sites, a clandestine place of worship and a burial ground for the most marginal of the dead, on the same high hill with, as a 1979 survey noted, excellent views in all directions, suggests a landscape that was quietly but deliberately claimed for purposes the law did not permit. By the time a survey was carried out in 1980, the enclosure around the burial ground had already been destroyed, and no burials were recorded as having taken place there since the turn of the twentieth century.