Known in Irish as a cillín, a word referring to these informal, unconsecrated burial places traditionally used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, this site marks a corner of the landscape where loss was quietly absorbed rather than officially recorded.

By the time the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled in 1838, even the church that gave the place its meaning had long vanished. The letters note that a little church called Cillín Cormaic, rendered in Latin as Cellula Cormaci, once stood on this headland, though no trace of it remained at that point. What did survive was the children's burial ground attached to it. The townland name itself preserves the memory of the building: Runakilleen derives from the Irish Ruan A Cillín, meaning the point of the little church, a phrase describing exactly this finger of land jutting into the lough. The church is gone, but its outline endures in the name of the ground beneath it.