There are no names cut into these markers, no dates, no identifying details; just simple grave-stones arranged across a roughly twelve metres by seven metres patch of earth to the north of a ruined church. The absence of inscription is not neglect but convention. For centuries across Ireland, children who died before baptism were considered ineligible for consecrated ground by Catholic canon law, and so their families turned instead to older, liminal places, often ancient enclosures or the ruins of early Christian sites, to bury them quietly. These places are known as cilliní, and Kilcasheen appears to have functioned as one.

The graveyard had already fallen out of regular use by 1739, which makes the record of its subsequent history all the more striking. When the famine of 1740 to 1741, sometimes called Bliain an Áir, the Year of Slaughter, struck with a severity that rivalled anything Ireland had yet experienced, the living turned back to this abandoned ground. The dead needed somewhere, and Kilcasheen received them again. Some burial continued sporadically into the twentieth century, a long tail of use that stretched well beyond the site's formal abandonment. A number of family names associated with the children buried there have been recorded locally, preserving at least a partial trace of who these individuals were, even where the stones above them say nothing at all. Several simple markers also lie within the footprint of the possible church structure itself, suggesting the boundaries between sacred interior and outer ground were not always observed or perhaps not always meaningful to the bereaved.