It is a cillín, a children's burial ground of the sort found scattered across Ireland, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred outside the formal rites of the Church. This one sits within an early ecclesiastical enclosure, which means the land itself has a religious history stretching back long before the conventions that made such separate burial necessary.

The site is roughly rectangular, measuring less than 24.8 metres on its longer axis and under 9.5 metres across, defined on three sides by a degraded scarp, a low worn earthwork that once marked a clear boundary, and on the fourth by a field wall. Inside, set stones mark individual graves, each oriented northeast to southwest, a alignment consistent with early Christian burial practice. Much of the northern sector is obscured by rubble and boulders, which have covered over many of the grave-markers, leaving the full extent of the burials uncertain. The enclosure it sits within has its own separate record, suggesting a longer layered use of this place, from early church activity to the marginal, sorrowful burials that characterise cillíní across the country.

Cillíní were in use from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and the grief attached to them is particular. Because unbaptised children were held by Catholic doctrine to be barred from consecrated burial, families interred them in liminal spaces, old enclosures, field boundaries, or ancient earthworks. The Kilcornan site, with its worn scarp and half-buried stones, is a small and unassuming example of a practice that touched an enormous number of Irish families across centuries.