The site at Gortnacarriga in Mid Cork is recorded under the name 'Plausnalanniv Burial Ground', a phonetic rendering that hints at an Irish-language original now difficult to fully reconstruct, and what defines it on the ground is not stone or inscription but absence: an area of bare rock outcrop, clear of the surrounding forestry plantation, where the earth simply would not take trees.

The earliest cartographic record of the site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is marked as a semicircular area outlined by a dotted line. That dotted boundary is significant; on OS maps of this period, dotted lines were commonly used to indicate features whose edges were approximate or whose legal or physical status was uncertain. The semicircular shape itself is a form sometimes associated with early or informal burial grounds in Ireland, particularly those outside the formal parish cemetery system. Such sites could serve communities burying unbaptised infants, the very poor, or those interred before or outside the reach of the established church. No grave markers have been recorded at Gortnacarriga, which makes formal identification difficult, but the combination of the mapped boundary and the distinct rock outcrop has been taken as sufficient indication of its character.

The site sits beside a road in forestry and is reached by a stile. The rock outcrop that sets it apart from the plantation around it is likely the most legible feature a visitor would find, a patch of exposed ground that has resisted the blanket of commercial forestry precisely because it offered nothing to plant in.