These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), exist in considerable numbers across Ireland, and for centuries they occupied a quietly troubling position in rural life. Catholic theological doctrine, as it was applied in practice, held that infants who died before baptism could not be buried in consecrated ground. Communities responded by designating their own spaces, often at the margins of townlands, near old earthworks, on the boundaries of fields, or beside ancient ecclesiastical ruins.

The Calluragh site is one of many such places recorded across Clare, a county with a significant concentration of these informal burial grounds. The cillín tradition persisted well into the twentieth century in parts of Ireland, though attitudes and practices varied from parish to parish. What made these places distinctive was not only their function but their ambiguity: they were maintained by communities, marked sometimes with simple stones or no marker at all, and they occupied a space between the sacred and the unconsecrated that families navigated with considerable grief and, often, considerable discretion. In more recent decades, there has been a growing movement across Ireland to acknowledge and sometimes formally commemorate these sites, recognising the sorrow attached to them and the children interred within them.