Local tradition holds that it served as a burial ground for children, though nothing visible on the ground confirms it. No grave-markers, no mounds, no inscribed stones; just the grassy interior of an ancient enclosure, carrying a memory that exists only in what people have passed down by word of mouth.

The practice of burying unbaptised children, and sometimes stillborns or infants who died before formal church rites, in marginal or liminal spaces was once widespread across Ireland. Raths, fairy forts, old ruins, and the edges of consecrated ground were all used for this purpose, partly from necessity and partly from a complex mix of folk belief and ecclesiastical exclusion. Children who died without baptism could not, under older Catholic teaching, be buried in consecrated ground, and so communities found other places, often ancient ones already freighted with a sense of otherworldliness. These burial grounds are sometimes called cilliní, though that term is not applied here in the available record. What makes Knockaninane particularly striking is the total absence of any physical trace, leaving only the oral tradition as evidence that this place was ever used in this way at all.