The blocks may once have served as grave-markers, and the mound itself is thought to be the result of clearance at some point in the past. What lies beneath, or once lay more visibly above ground, was a children's burial ground, a cillín in the Irish tradition, where infants who died unbaptised were interred outside the boundaries of consecrated Church cemeteries.

Cillíní are found across Ireland, often in liminal or ancient spaces, ringforts among the most common choices. A ringfort is an enclosed settlement, typically of early medieval date, defined by one or more circular earthen banks. By the time these sites were being used for unofficial burial, the ringforts themselves were long abandoned as dwellings, and their slightly uncanny status in the landscape, old, enclosed, neither fully secular nor sacred, made them seem appropriate for children who occupied an equally ambiguous position in Catholic theology. The particular ringfort at Cloghagalla Eighter is recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999, which notes the survival of this mound and its possible grave-markers within the fort's bounds.

What remains at the site is minimal. The limestone blocks that protrude from the mound carry no inscriptions, no names, and no dates, which is entirely consistent with the informal, largely undocumented nature of cillín burial. The people who buried children in these places rarely left records of any kind, and the mound's irregular shape suggests the site has been disturbed or levelled at some point, leaving only the faintest trace of what may have been a significant local place of grief.