It belongs to a category of site found across Ireland known variously as a cillín, killeen, or children's burial ground, places set apart from consecrated churchyards where unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered to exist outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church, were interred quietly and often without marker. These are liminal places in the most literal sense, neither fully inside nor outside the community's sacred geography, and they carry a particular stillness that distinguishes them from ordinary graveyards.

The practice of burying unbaptised children separately arose from the theological position, long held in Catholic doctrine, that infants who died before baptism could not be admitted to heaven or given a Christian burial in consecrated ground. Families were left to find their own solutions, and they did, in their thousands, across the length of the country. Old ringfort banks, the edges of ancient monuments, and marginal scraps of land became informal but deeply serious burial places, often used generation after generation within a community. Meenbannivane lies in a part of Kerry where the landscape itself carries layer upon layer of such history, and the presence of a cillín here fits a pattern common to the wider region, though the specific history of this particular site remains sparsely documented at present.