This was not an ancient practice sealed off by centuries of distance, but something that continued into relatively recent decades, a reminder that the old customs governing infant death and Catholic doctrine retained a hold on rural communities long after they might have been expected to fade.

The practice at Kilmurrily belonged to a wider Irish tradition centred on what are known as cillíní, informal burial grounds set apart from consecrated parish cemeteries. Because Catholic teaching held that unbaptised infants could not enter heaven, they were excluded from sanctified ground. Ruined early Christian churches and their surrounding land occupied an ambiguous sacred middle ground, neither fully consecrated in the modern parish sense nor entirely ordinary earth, and so communities across Ireland quietly adopted such places for infants who had died before baptism, as well as others considered ineligible for formal burial. At Kilmurrily, the ruined church itself served this function, and according to the North Kerry Archaeological Survey published in 1995, the site was still receiving such burials as recently as the mid-1970s or thereabouts, depending on when that account was compiled.