These grounds, known in Irish as cilliní (singular cillín), were used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic Church teaching. They occupy a distinctive and often melancholy place in the Irish landscape, typically sited at the edges of townlands, beside old ringforts, on coastal promontories, or within the ruins of early medieval enclosures. Their locations were chosen with care, close enough to hallowed ground to offer some spiritual proximity, yet deliberately apart from it.

The use of cilliní in Ireland persisted from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, driven by the doctrine that unbaptised children could not receive a Christian burial. Families who lost infants before baptism, or who buried stillborn children, had little choice but to inter them in these informal grounds, often at night and without ceremony, to avoid drawing attention to what the Church regarded as an incomplete spiritual state. The grief attached to such burials was compounded by their secrecy, and many cilliní passed out of living memory within a generation or two of falling out of use. The site at Ardour is one of numerous such grounds recorded across County Galway, a county with a particularly dense distribution of these places given the size and rural character of its population through the centuries when the practice was most common.