Known historically as Keelboultragh, the site was used, within living memory of nineteenth-century informants, for the burial of unbaptised children and those who had died by suicide, two categories of person excluded from consecrated ground by church custom. That much is unusual enough. But beneath and around this later use lies evidence of far older activity: cist-formed graves, stone-lined burials constructed from flags set on edge, and the remains of what appears to have been a substantial early ecclesiastical enclosure encircling the whole area.

The antiquarian Richard Rolt Brash, writing in 1879, recorded that a landowner had levelled most of the earthen rampart of the larger enclosure in the early nineteenth century, and had also removed a considerable number of pillar stones that once stood within it. When a road was cut through the site on a north-south axis around the same time, a great number of cist graves came to light. The antiquarian John Windele visited in 1851 and was told by a local tenant farmer that he had opened several of the graves himself, finding only human remains, skulls and bones. Windele compared these burials with similar long cists found at Ballymacus. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the site as Kill Burial Ground, the prefix "kill" deriving from the Irish "cill", meaning a small church or early monastic cell. The same maps note dalláin or galláin on the south-western side of the burial ground; these standing stones appear to have served as an entrance feature for both the smaller burial enclosure and the larger surrounding one. Three possible ogham stones, the distinctive early medieval script carved along the edges of upright stones, are also associated with the site. What survives today includes the entrance stones and a short section of the adjacent bank, the remainder of what was once a more legible early Christian landscape having been dismantled before anyone thought to record it fully.