Rough rubble stones, barely proud of the earth and half-consumed by vegetation, mark out a roughly rectangular area no larger than a modest room, about five metres east to west and three metres north to south. Local tradition identifies this as a children's burial ground, a place apart from the main graveyard that surrounds it.

Such sites are found across Ireland, and they carry a specific weight of history. Known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), these were informal burial grounds used for children who died without being baptised, a category that, under older Catholic doctrine, was considered ineligible for consecrated ground. Parents, barred from burying their infants in the parish graveyard proper, found other solutions: old ringforts, field boundaries, coastal strands, and, as here, the margins just outside a church wall. The Kilmeen site sits on a slight rise immediately outside the north-east end of the church, within the broader graveyard enclosure but meaningfully separate from it. That spatial distinction, a few metres of ground, carried enormous theological and social significance for the communities who maintained it. The stones here are unworked, set without inscription, and have sunk so far into the soil that the boundary of the area is only just legible.