The reason is simple enough: it holds the remains of an ancient church and, around it, a scattering of rough upright stones that mark a burial ground where unbaptised children were laid to rest within living memory of those who recorded the tradition.

The practice of burying unbaptised infants in separate, unconsecrated ground was once widespread across Ireland. Catholic doctrine held that children who died before baptism could not be interred in consecrated churchyards, and so communities quietly maintained their own alternative spaces, often near old monastic ruins or at the edges of parishes. These places are variously called cillíní or killeens, and they occupy an ambiguous position in Irish religious and folk life, neither fully sacred nor entirely secular, but treated with a particular kind of solemnity. The site on Fenit Island fits squarely into this tradition. Folklore collected by pupils at Chapeltown school, under the Irish Schools' Scheme of the late 1930s, recorded that the ruin stands about two hundred yards inland and to the south-west of the castle on Fenit Island, and that hollows in the surrounding ground suggest other buildings once stood close to the church itself. The upright stones, rough and uncarved, are the only markers the buried children ever received.

What makes the place quietly unusual is the firmness of the local feeling attached to it. The insistence that the quarter-acre was never tilled and never will be is not a legal protection but something older, a community understanding that certain ground carries a weight that ordinary land does not. The ruin and its small field of stones have been left to themselves, hemmed in by that unspoken agreement.