Killeens, from the Irish cillíní (the diminutive of cill, meaning church), is a term used across Ireland to describe small, informal burial grounds set apart from consecrated parish cemeteries. These were the quiet, marginal places where unbaptised infants, stillborns, and occasionally suicides or others excluded from official Church burial rites were laid to rest, often without marker or record. A graveyard carrying this name in County Kerry is therefore not simply an old plot of land with headstones; it points to a shadow history of grief managed outside the formal structures of religious life.

Cillíní are found in their hundreds across Ireland, tucked into ringforts, positioned near ancient ecclesiastical sites, or occupying liminal spots at field boundaries and shorelines. The choice of location was rarely arbitrary. Many were placed deliberately close to pre-Christian monuments or at the edges of settled land, spaces understood to be neither fully of the living world nor wholly of the dead. In Kerry, where early medieval ecclesiastical remains are particularly dense, these small grounds often exist in close proximity to ruined churches or to the remains of much older ritual landscapes. The practice of using them persisted well into the twentieth century in some parts of rural Ireland, long after it had faded elsewhere.