The children's burial ground, whose enclosing walls were most likely built in the early 1800s, had been constructed one to two metres outside an older wall on a slightly different axis, effectively enlarging and absorbing what lay beneath. It was only when the site was fully excavated in advance of the road works that this earlier layer came to light.

The earlier burial ground, roughly rectangular and measuring twenty metres east to west by fourteen metres north to south, dates to the late fifteenth century. Its enclosing wall survived only as footings, a double row of upright boulders and slabs, with what may have been a stone-lined entrance gap in the western side. At the western end stood a leacht, a small stone-built structure resembling an altar, associated with votive offerings including water-rolled cobbles and quartz pebbles left by mourners. No infants were found in this earlier layer, and the graves contained no coffin nails or other modern material, in contrast to the upper burials, where fragments of small wooden coffins and copper-wire shroud pins were recovered. In total, 248 skeletons were recovered across both phases: 181 identified as children and 67 as adults. Among the adults from the earliest phase, an unusual pattern emerged in grave orientation: most female skeletons were aligned east-southeast to west-northwest, while male skeletons lay predominantly east to west, a distinction that may echo a medieval practice of gendered burial separation. Osteological analysis painted a vivid, if sobering, picture of the population. The most common age at death among adults fell within the 25 to 35 year bracket, and dental evidence pointed to widespread cavities, gum disease, and tooth loss, more pronounced in women. Thirty-three individuals showed signs of dental enamel hypoplasia, a condition in which periods of serious illness during childhood, such as fever or starvation, leave a permanent record in the teeth; most such episodes appeared to have occurred between the ages of two and five. One woman, aged between 17 and 25 at death, carried evidence of three separate bouts of ill health across her short life. Perhaps the most arresting of all the burials was that of a woman aged between 25 and 35 who was pregnant at the time of her death; three blade injuries to her skull suggest she was most likely murdered. The site's broader landscape also proved unexpectedly layered: 247 flint and chert artefacts pointing to activity from the Mesolithic onwards, an Iron Age metalworking site forty metres to the north, and traces of early medieval cultivation ridges and metalworking were all uncovered, though none of these earlier phases appears to be directly connected with the later burial ground. Whether the burial ground was founded with ecclesiastical sanction or always stood outside consecrated ground remains unknown. Local tradition holds that some of its burials date to the Famine period. Following excavation, all skeletal remains were reburied with full funeral rites at the parish graveyard at Ballynahaglish.