Unbaptised infants were most commonly buried here, along with stillborn children, and occasionally strangers or those who had died by suicide. The word killeen derives from the Irish "cillín", a diminutive of "cill", meaning a small church or cell, though by the time most of these sites were in use the ecclesiastical connection had long since faded into folk memory. What remained was a place at the margins, literally and spiritually, where grief was carried out quietly and without ceremony.

These sites occupy a strange position in Irish cultural history. Neither fully sacred nor entirely secular, killeens were used well into the twentieth century in some parts of the west of Ireland, particularly in counties along the Atlantic seaboard where older customs persisted alongside official religious practice. The geography of County Mayo, with its dispersed rural settlements and deep-rooted traditions, made it a county where such sites were relatively numerous. The Oughty killeen fits into that pattern, a small, local, largely undocumented place that served a community's most private sorrows over an extended period. Precise dates of use and any associated historical figures connected with this particular site are not currently recorded in available sources.

For anyone moving through this part of Mayo, killeens can be easy to miss. They tend to be small enclosures, sometimes marked by a low drystone wall or a scatter of unmarked stones, often sited near a field boundary, a stream, or on slightly elevated ground. The absence of inscribed headstones is typical; the burials were deliberate but unannounced, and the landscape has often quietly absorbed them over time.