Known in Irish tradition as a cillín (the plural is cilliní), these were informal burial places set aside for unbaptised infants, stillborns, and occasionally others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic Church practice. They occupy a particular kind of threshold in the Irish landscape, neither fully sacred nor fully ordinary, often sited at townland boundaries, beside ringforts, along the margins of bogs, or within the remains of earlier ecclesiastical enclosures.

The practice of burying unbaptised children apart from the main churchyard was rooted in theological doctrine around original sin, which held that without baptism a child could not enter heaven and therefore could not be interred in blessed ground. This left families in the painful position of conducting their own quiet, unofficial burials, often at night and without ceremony, in places that carried their own older sense of sanctity or liminality. The tradition persisted in parts of Ireland well into the twentieth century, and the sites themselves vary considerably, from a few unmarked stones gathered in a field corner to more substantial enclosed areas with visible grave markers. Ballymacooda, in the broader landscape of Clare, sits within a county that retains a notable density of such sites, many of them still unrecorded in any formal detail.