These are known as cillíní, places where unbaptised children, and sometimes others who were excluded from formal Christian burial, were laid to rest in unconsecrated ground. The one at Emlagh in County Clare is among these quietly melancholy sites, occupying a category of monument that was, for centuries, written out of official commemoration and only recently brought into serious archaeological consideration.

The practice of burying unbaptised infants in separate, marginal ground was widespread in Ireland from the early medieval period well into the twentieth century. Catholic doctrine held that those who died without baptism could not enter consecrated ground, and so families carried their infants to liminal places, often old raths, field boundaries, shorelines, or the edges of ancient ecclesiastical sites. Cillíní tend to be small, unenclosed or lightly enclosed plots, with few or no grave markers. At Emlagh, the site fits into this broader tradition, carrying with it the weight of private grief that rarely found its way into parish records or public memory. Clare's landscape holds a number of such sites, reflecting both the density of its early Christian heritage and the persistence of local burial customs long after formal church structures might have been expected to absorb them entirely.