Small boulders serve as grave-markers, and the mound itself is unenclosed, without the wall or ditch that typically defines a formal graveyard. Its Irish name, Reilig na bPáistí Marbha, translates as the burial ground of the dead children, and that name alone locates it within a once-widespread practice across Ireland of burying unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborns, in ground set apart from consecrated parish cemeteries.

These informal burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were a quiet but common feature of the rural landscape for centuries, used because Catholic doctrine long held that unbaptised children could not be interred in consecrated ground. Families responded by maintaining their own places, often at liminal spots, old ring-fort banks, cliff edges, or, as here, the margins of an island. On Inish Travin, the site sits roughly ninety metres from the shore, in the western part of the island. According to local sources recorded by Tim Robinson, whose meticulous mapping and documentation of the Connemara and Aran landscapes produced some of the most detailed accounts of such features, the ground had not been used for at least thirty-five years by the mid-1980s. Robinson noted it in 1985, though the site itself was not visited by surveyors at the time of the inventory compiled by Paul Gosling and published in 1993.

The combination of remoteness and disuse means the site survives largely as landscape rather than monument, a low mound with stones that could easily be passed over without knowing what they mark. Inish Travin is a small and sparsely populated island, and access depends on local arrangements rather than any formal ferry route. The western ground where the cillín lies would be unremarkable to anyone without the name and the context, which is perhaps in keeping with the quiet, unofficial character these places always had.