These grounds, known in Irish as cilliní (singular cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants, and sometimes of others considered to exist at the margins of the Church's sacramental reach: stillborn children, the unbaptised, occasionally suicides or strangers. Because Catholic doctrine held that the unbaptised could not enter consecrated ground, families buried their infants in liminal spaces instead, at old ruin sites, on townland boundaries, beside ancient enclosures, or in places already understood to carry a quiet sanctity outside the parish church's jurisdiction. The practice continued in some areas well into the twentieth century.