Positioned on generally poor land overlooking Tremone Bay to the north, this poignant site serves as a reminder of Ireland’s complex burial traditions. These unconsecrated grounds, known as cillíní, were typically reserved for unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and sometimes adults who died by suicide or were considered outsiders to the church community.

Archaeological monitoring in 2001, conducted during the construction of holiday dwellings just 60 metres east of the burial ground, revealed little beyond the remnants of recently demolished outhouses; a mortar floor, rubble fill, and modern artefacts in the topsoil. The excavation, which extended up to 2.1 metres deep across a 36 metre stretch of the north-facing slope, encountered orange-brown natural subsoil and bedrock beneath the modern disturbance, but no evidence of burials or earlier occupation was discovered within the development area itself.

The children’s burial ground at Ballymagaraghy remains undisturbed, its exact boundaries and the number of interments unknown. Like many such sites across Donegal and Ireland, it exists now primarily in local memory and archaeological records, a quiet testament to the grief of families who, denied church burial for their children, sought solace in these liminal spaces between the consecrated and the forgotten.