Somewhere in a field near Kilkea in County Kildare, there is a burial ground with no headstones. No names are recorded, no dates carved in stone. The ground holds only the unbaptised and the stillborn, children who, under Catholic practice as it operated for centuries in Ireland, were considered ineligible for burial in consecrated ground. These informal burial places, sometimes called cillíní, were set apart from parish graveyards, tucked into marginal land, old ruins, or field corners, and this one in Kilkea is among them.

Writing between 1906 and 1908, Fitzgerald described the site as consisting of an oblong building standing in the middle of a field, accompanied by a children's burial ground. The building, presumably the remains of an early chapel, had no surviving headstones and was used solely for the interment of unbaptised or stillborn children. The physical evidence for the chapel itself is largely ghostly at this point. An aerial photograph, referenced by Barrett, shows an oblong positive cropmark, the kind of mark left in growing crops when buried foundations affect soil moisture and nutrients differently from the surrounding earth. That cropmark lines up with hachuring on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1909, corroborating the location of the former structure even where nothing visible remains above ground.