The ground is unenclosed and irregular, easy to overlook, and locally it carries the name killeen, a term used throughout Ireland for unconsecrated burial places where unbaptised infants and others excluded from churchyard burial were quietly interred. What makes this particular killeen somewhat unusual is that local tradition also associates it with plague victims from the seventeenth century, suggesting it served a broader community in extremity as well as its more familiar role.

The ritual attached to burials here is where the site becomes genuinely distinctive. Writing in 1914, Lynch Athy documented a custom observed whenever a burial took place: the mourners would walk roughly two hundred metres to the south-southeast to St Cornane's Well, where they washed three corners of the sheet that had covered the coffin, and offered prayers for the soul of the deceased. The practice draws together two overlapping traditions, the killeen and the holy well, in a sequence that has the character of folk liturgy. Holy wells across Ireland were long understood as sites of intercessory power, and the specific detail of washing three corners of the burial sheet, not four, not two, suggests a rite with its own careful internal logic, even if that logic is no longer fully recoverable. The pairing of a burial ground with a nearby well, connected by a prescribed act of mourning, points to a community working out its own forms of consolation at the edges of official religious practice.