What makes it quietly extraordinary is the layering: a children's burial ground established around, and making deliberate use of, a megalithic tomb of prehistoric origin. The two belong to entirely different worlds, yet the later community evidently found meaning in placing their dead beside the ancient one.

The site is a cillín, the Irish term for an informal, unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial under Catholic canon law. These places were common across Ireland from the medieval period onwards, often sited at prehistoric monuments, liminal locations felt to carry some older sanctity. At Ballinastack, the cillín wraps around a megalithic tomb, a Neolithic or Bronze Age structure built from large standing stones, and the ground within that square, unenclosed area is marked by numerous set stones and stone-lined graves, all oriented east to west in the Christian manner. The site is well-preserved, and according to local tradition, burials here continued until around 1955, meaning living memory connects directly to its use. That date places it well within the twentieth century, long after most such grounds had quietly fallen out of practice elsewhere.