These grounds, known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), were used for the burial of unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered outside the bounds of formal Catholic burial rites, including stillborn children, strangers, and occasionally suicides. Because unbaptised children were, under older Church doctrine, deemed ineligible for consecrated ground, families interred them instead in marginal spaces: field boundaries, ancient earthworks, shorelines, and forgotten corners of the land.

The practice was widespread from at least the medieval period and continued in parts of rural Ireland well into the twentieth century. Cillíní are often marked by little more than small stones or simple field depressions, and many have no formal monument at all. Their locations were passed down through local memory rather than official record, which means a significant number have been lost or are only partially documented. The Curraghmore site belongs to this category of place, known to exist but not yet fully described in the public record, a circumstance that itself reflects how these burials existed outside institutional acknowledgement for so long.

The site sits in a part of Mayo where the landscape retains traces of older land use patterns, though without further documentation it is not possible to say precisely what physical form the ground takes today, how it is bounded, or whether it is marked in any visible way. Visitors approaching such sites anywhere in Ireland are generally advised to treat them with care; they remain, in many communities, places of genuine private grief as much as historical interest.