The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 records it plainly as "Kilnaknappogue Burial Ground for Children", which places it within a tradition of dedicated children's burial sites known across Ireland as cillíní. These were unconsecrated or informally consecrated plots where unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborn children, were interred separately from the main churchyard, excluded by Catholic doctrine from burial in consecrated ground. The practice was widespread for centuries, and the sites are often quiet, easily overlooked corners of fields, headlands, or old monastic enclosures.

The ground at Kilnaknappoge is modest in scale, measuring roughly sixteen metres north to south and ten metres east to west, its boundary defined not by a wall or ditch but by the grave markers themselves. Today it sits in open pasture, with a coniferous plantation closing in on three sides to the north, south, and west. That compression of evergreen forestry around a site once open to the sky gives the place a particular quality, the markers occupying a clearing that feels less found than enclosed. The 1842 map reference is the clearest historical anchor available, though the burials themselves could easily predate that record by generations, as cillíní were rarely formally established and rarely formally documented.