These were informal, unconsecrated burial places used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, and occasionally others considered outside the boundaries of the formal Catholic churchyard, including stillborn children, travellers, and those who had died by suicide. Their locations, often on marginal land, at field boundaries, beside ancient earthworks, or close to water, reflect the ambiguous spiritual status assigned to those buried within them, neither fully of the parish community nor entirely beyond care.

The practice of burying unbaptised children in separate ground was shaped by the theological position, long held in Catholic teaching, that those who died without baptism could not enter consecrated ground or receive a Christian funeral. Families nonetheless buried their children with tenderness and in places that carried their own quiet significance, frequently at the sites of earlier, pre-Christian burial, which may have lent the ground a sense of ancient sanctity. Many cilliní were in use from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, and some continued to receive burials well after official Church attitudes began to soften. The Clare landscape is particularly dense with such sites, reflecting both the county's long settlement history and the survival of rural burial customs into relatively recent times.

Because detailed records for this specific site at Aillroe Beg are limited, the finer details of its history, its period of use, its physical form, and any local traditions attached to it, remain to be fully documented. Visitors to Clare who take an interest in these sites will often find them marked by simple stones, low enclosing walls, or slight rises in field corners, easy to overlook and rarely signposted, which is perhaps in keeping with the quiet, private grief they were always meant to hold.