These sites, known in Irish tradition as killeens or cillíní, were informal burial grounds set apart from consecrated churchyards. Catholic doctrine held that infants who died before baptism could not be interred in sacred ground, so communities found their own places, field corners, old earthworks, clifftops, and liminal spots at the edges of parishes, where these children could be laid to rest outside the formal rites of the Church.

This particular killeen was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 under the name Killeen Children's Burial Ground, which suggests it was already understood and named as such by the time the surveyors passed through north Kerry. By the time the site was mapped again in 1939, it was noted as disused. Within a decade, it had been ploughed out entirely, leaving the slight depression that survives today. It is a pattern repeated across Ireland, where hundreds of these sites were lost to agricultural improvement during the mid-twentieth century, their physical traces erased even as the social memory of them lingered in local knowledge.