These burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were used to inter unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice; they were often established beside ruined or ancient churches, occupying a liminal space between sacred and ordinary land. The one at Killoughane occupied the south side of the church, and its disappearance within living memory makes it a particularly quiet kind of erasure.

The church itself, Cill Lócháin, appears in the Papal Taxation Lists of 1302 to 1306, placing it firmly within the medieval ecclesiastical landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry. The scholar Ó Cíobháin has suggested it fell out of use in favour of the nearby Knocknane Church at Churchtown by the early fifteenth century, a common enough fate for smaller rural churches as parishes were reorganised. Writing in 1837, Lewis recorded that it was dependent on the Macgillycuddy tower house at Dromloughane, indicating it had been tied to one of the local Gaelic lordships during its active years. What remains of the structure is a rubble-built wall, bonded with sandy mortar, measuring 3.5 metres long, 1.2 metres thick, and up to 3 metres in height. A rough corbel, a projecting stone bracket built into the wall to support a beam or roof structure, sits 2.2 metres above the present ground level on the inner face. Ordnance Survey maps show the church was originally a rectangular building oriented east to west, the standard Christian alignment, and the surviving wall appears to be a portion of its southern side. Excavation along the north and east sides in the 1970s uncovered stone foundations, which were then removed.