What marks it out is the purpose it served: this is a cillín, a children's burial ground, of the kind once found across rural Ireland in their hundreds. The trapezoidal enclosure, measuring roughly twenty metres along its longer axis and eleven metres across, is bounded by a low, poorly preserved bank of earth and stone. Inside, numerous small set stones break the grass at irregular intervals, each one marking a grave oriented northeast to southwest.

Cilliní occupy a particular and sorrowful corner of Irish social history. Because Catholic doctrine for much of the early modern and modern period denied a formal church burial to unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and sometimes others considered outside the bounds of consecrated ground, communities created their own places of interment. These were often located at liminal spots: the edges of townlands, beside water, on old earthworks, or at sites already considered set apart from ordinary land use. The Caltragh site fits this pattern closely. Its position on a hillock immediately east of a stream, within otherwise unremarkable farmland, suggests a place deliberately chosen for its threshold quality, neither fully domestic nor formally sacred. The graves themselves, marked by modest fieldstones rather than inscribed monuments, reflect the informal and often private nature of these burials, which were carried out quietly, usually at night, without clergy.