' The plot is substantial, measuring 162 metres on its longer axis and 70 metres across, dimensions that hint at the sheer number of people who came to rest here, most of them likely victims of the Great Famine of the 1840s and 1850s.

Workhouse burial grounds were a feature of the Poor Law system introduced to Ireland in 1838, which divided the country into Poor Law Unions, each required to construct and maintain a workhouse for the destitute poor. Those who died inside these institutions, or who collapsed and died in the surrounding districts while seeking relief, were typically buried in plots attached to or associated with the workhouse, often without individual grave markers and in conditions that reflected the mass scale of mortality during the Famine years. The ground at Deerpark is one such site, its name preserved in cartographic record even as physical evidence on the ground may have faded. It was entered into the Register of Historic Monuments, with its listing appearing in Iris Oifigiúil, the official gazette of the Irish state, on 15 January 2002.