There is something quietly telling about the fact that a graveyard closed to the general public in August 1899 continued to receive the smallest of the dead. The old graveyard in Kilcock, County Kildare, became, after its official closure, a place where stillborn babies were laid to rest, the kind of arrangement that speaks to a particular and long-standing grief in Irish rural life.

The practice of burying unbaptised or stillborn infants in liminal spaces, such as old and disused graveyards, runs deep in Irish tradition. Because Church law for much of Irish history denied unbaptised children burial in consecrated ground, families turned to places that existed at the edge of official religious life, old enclosures, ruined churchyards, boundary ditches. The Kilcock graveyard, once formally closed for new burials in 1899, appears to have taken on precisely this role. Whether the closure itself made it feel like an appropriate threshold space, or whether the practice simply continued quietly from before, is not recorded, but Simms, writing in 1999, noted the connection between the closure and the continued use for stillborn children with a suggestive "despite, or perhaps because of."