The site at Ardkearagh is known locally by the Irish term ceallúnach, a word used across Ireland for these informal burial places reserved for unbaptised infants, and sometimes also for strangers or the unbaptised poor. Such sites occupy a particular and melancholy position in Irish religious and social history, existing outside consecrated ground because Catholic doctrine, as it was widely understood for centuries, held that unbaptised souls could not enter heaven and therefore could not lie in blessed earth.

The Ardkearagh ceallúnach continued in use until at least the 1940s, which is a striking detail. By that point Ireland had long been a country with modern hospitals and established parish infrastructure, yet the old custom of burying unbaptised children in these separate, liminal spaces persisted into living memory within this community. The practice reflects not simply theological stricture but something more local and intimate, a way of marking grief that was simultaneously excluded from official mourning and quietly maintained by the people who needed it.