This is a ceallúnach, a type of unconsecrated burial ground traditionally used for the interment of unbaptised infants, and sometimes also for stillborn children, strangers, or others considered ineligible for burial in sanctified church ground. Because Catholic theology long held that unbaptised souls could not enter heaven, families who lost a child before baptism had nowhere else to turn. These liminal plots, set apart from the parish graveyard, became places of quiet grief carried out at the margins of official religious life.

At Staigue, the physical evidence of this use survives in the western half of the site, where the ground is slightly raised. In the north-western quadrant, a number of upright stone slabs remain in place. Local information associates these slabs with the site's function as a ceallúnach burial ground, and the detail is recorded in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996. The raised ground and the arrangement of the slabs suggest repeated, if informal, use over time, though no precise dates are attached to the burials themselves. The site carries the kind of understated material record typical of ceallúnach sites generally: no inscribed headstones, no formal layout, just the ground itself and a few stones set upright in the earth.