These burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered, under Catholic doctrine, ineligible for consecrated ground. They occupy marginal spaces, field boundaries, old ringfort interiors, coastal dunes, and places that were already understood as liminal or set apart. The practice was widespread across Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and the sites themselves are often unmarked or only faintly visible, a scatter of small stones or a slight undulation in a field.

The Lenafin site is recorded as an archaeological monument in County Galway, though detailed historical documentation specific to this particular ground is not currently available. What can be said is that cillíní in Connacht, as elsewhere, tended to be located at places with some pre-existing sense of remove from ordinary parish life, whether that was a ruined early Christian enclosure, a boundary ditch, or simply a corner of ground that had long been understood as neither fully domestic nor fully sacred. The weight of grief attached to these places was real and lasting; families buried children there in secrecy or in sorrow, often at night, and the sites were rarely given formal memorialisation.