These were places set apart from consecrated parish cemeteries, used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic practice, could not be interred in sanctified ground. They are found across Ireland in their hundreds, often occupying older, pre-Christian sites such as ancient earthworks, ringfort interiors, or forgotten ecclesiastical enclosures. Their locations were rarely formally recorded and their use was frequently furtive, carried out at night to avoid clerical disapproval, which means that many remain unmarked and quietly unacknowledged in the landscape.

The practice of burying unbaptised children in such liminal spaces reflects a long and painful intersection of theological doctrine and folk belief. Without baptism, a child was considered to exist in a state of original sin and therefore ineligible for Christian burial rites. The grief of parents was compounded by the denial of the usual ceremonies of mourning. Communities responded by maintaining their own informal burial places, often on the edges of fields, beside water, or within the boundaries of older, half-remembered sacred ground. In Connacht particularly, where the land retains dense layers of pre-Christian and early medieval activity, townlands like Treanrevagh frequently hold sites of this kind within their boundaries, though the precise history of this particular ground remains to be fully documented.