Its boundaries are partly modern walls, partly large slabs set upright on their edges, and partly bare outcrops of rock. The enclosure at Gort Na Cille is recorded as a killeen, a small, informal burial ground of the kind used across Ireland for unbaptised infants. Because Catholic doctrine long held that unbaptised children could not enter consecrated ground, families buried them instead in liminal places, often at townland boundaries, beside ancient monuments, or in spots that already carried some sense of the sacred or the marginal. This site, overlooking the bay and set apart from any formal churchyard, fits that pattern precisely.

The name of the place complicates the picture usefully. Gort Na Cille translates roughly as "field of the church" or "church field", which suggests that something older and more formally religious may once have been associated with this ground, even if nothing of a church now survives. Adding a further layer of uncertainty, a researcher named O'Connell noted a fallen gallaun here, a gallaun being a standing stone, typically prehistoric in origin. It is not clear from the available record what precisely he was referring to, or whether the stone he identified still exists in any form. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, compiling their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996, recorded the site as it then stood without resolving the question. The result is a place that carries at least three overlapping histories: prehistoric monument, early ecclesiastical site, and post-medieval killeen, none of them fully legible from what remains.