Known variously as cillíní, killeens, or children's burial grounds, these were places set aside, usually at the margins of consecrated land, for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal Christian burial. The practice was rooted in the theological position, long maintained by the Catholic Church, that children who died before baptism could not be received into consecrated ground. Families, unwilling to leave their dead without any kind of resting place, turned instead to liminal spots: old ringforts, boundaries between townlands, the edges of bogs, or disused ecclesiastical enclosures.

The site at Gortnahaha is one of hundreds of such places recorded across Clare and the wider west of Ireland. These grounds were rarely marked with headstones and were not maintained in the way that parish graveyards were. Their locations were kept in local memory rather than on maps, passed between generations as a kind of quiet, necessary knowledge. Over the course of the twentieth century, as theology shifted and the practice of using cillíní declined, many sites were forgotten, overgrown, or built upon without recognition of what lay beneath. The ones that survive in the archaeological record do so largely because communities remembered them, or because field surveyors noticed the subtle surface signs, slight depressions, small unmarked stones, that distinguish a cillín from ordinary ground.