These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered, under strict Catholic doctrine, ineligible for burial in consecrated ground. They occupy a peculiar and melancholy place in the Irish landscape, often sited at parish boundaries, beside ancient earthworks, or at the edges of bogs, their locations chosen with quiet deliberation but their existence largely unacknowledged in the official record.

The practice of using cillíní reflects a long tension between official Church teaching and the pastoral realities of rural life. Because unbaptised children were held to be excluded from heaven under the doctrine of limbo, they could not be buried in the churchyard alongside the rest of the community. Families, unwilling to leave their infants entirely without a resting place, turned instead to older, pre-Christian or liminal ground. The sites were typically unmarked, or marked only with small stones, and grief was carried privately. The cillín at Farrihy belongs to this widespread but underacknowledged tradition, one that persisted well into the twentieth century in parts of Ireland.