No headstones mark it, no formal boundary announces it, and no documentary record of burials has been confirmed. Yet the uneven surface underfoot suggests the earth has not always lain undisturbed, and the place carries the specific weight of a cillín, the informal term for a burial ground used for unbaptised children and others excluded from consecrated ground. These sites were scattered across the Irish countryside and held a complicated place in local feeling, at once avoided and quietly respected.

When the archaeologist Hartnett recorded the site in 1939, he measured an oval area of roughly sixty metres east to west and fifty metres north to south, enclosed by a field fence running from the south-west to the south-east, with a slight ridge running in the same general direction. What he also collected, just as carefully, was the local explanation: that it was an old burial ground for children, and that misfortune came to those who disturbed it. Decades later, when the site was revisited, the ground remained exactly as Hartnett had described it. No plough had touched it. The warning, or the memory of the warning, had held.