Within its bounds, a section was set aside specifically for the burial of children, and local information confirms that interments here continued into the mid-twentieth century. These children's burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were a widespread but rarely discussed feature of the Irish landscape. Unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborn children, were considered by ecclesiastical tradition to be ineligible for consecrated ground, and so communities found their own places to lay them, often at the margins of older sacred sites, at boundaries, or beside the sea. Carrowneden represents exactly this kind of liminal arrangement, a space folded quietly inside a larger religious enclosure, set apart and yet not entirely separate.

The graveyard itself encloses the remains of a church, suggesting a site with roots considerably older than the post-Famine era, when cillíní were most commonly recorded in use. About thirty metres to the south-east, a holy well completes the picture of a place that accumulated layers of local devotion across centuries. Holy wells in Ireland frequently served as focal points for practices that blended early Christian observance with much older patterns of veneration, and their proximity to burial sites is not unusual. That children continued to be buried at Carrowneden into the mid-twentieth century is a reminder that official Church policy and local custom did not always move in step, and that families navigated grief in ways that made use of what the landscape offered them.