On an east-facing slope in County Galway, beside a stream and enclosed by grassland, lies a rectangular plot where local tradition holds that children were buried, though the ground gives almost nothing away. The enclosure measures roughly fourteen and a half metres east to west and eleven metres north to south, defined by a low earthen bank, heavily overgrown with trees and bushes, and ringed by a shallow external fosse, a drainage or boundary ditch of the kind that often marks out deliberate, bounded space in the Irish landscape. Nothing breaks the surface inside.

Places like this are known in Ireland as cillíní, informal burial grounds used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered ineligible for consecrated ground. The practice was rooted in Catholic theological teaching on original sin, which held that the unbaptised could not enter heaven and therefore could not be buried in the churchyard. Families found other solutions: marginal land, old ringfort banks, the edges of fields, spots near running water. The earthen enclosure at Killeenadeema follows that pattern, quietly set apart from the ordinary landscape of the living without being entirely abandoned by it. The absence of grave-markers is typical; these were not places of commemoration in any formal sense, and the knowledge of what a site was tended to pass through local memory rather than through stone or inscription.