These grounds, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used for the burial of unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered to occupy an ambiguous position in relation to the Church, including stillborn children, those who died before receiving the sacrament, and occasionally strangers or suicides. Because Catholic doctrine long held that the unbaptised could not enter consecrated ground, families turned to marginal spaces, the edges of bogs, old ringfort ditches, shorelines, and forgotten pre-Christian enclosures, to bury their children with as much dignity as circumstances allowed.

The practice was widespread from at least the medieval period and continued in some areas well into the twentieth century. Cillíní are often located near the remains of early ecclesiastical sites or ancient enclosures, suggesting a folk memory of sacred ground that predates formal parish boundaries. The name Ballinlawless itself likely derives from the Irish Baile an Leamhlaois or a similar form, though the precise etymology of such placenames can vary. The sites are rarely marked with inscribed stones and are frequently invisible to a passing eye, known mainly through local memory and the slight irregularities of the ground where small bodies were laid without ceremony or recorded grief.

Because so little documented detail is currently available for this particular site, what it looked like, how long it was in use, or whether any surface features survive, it is difficult to say more with confidence. What can be said is that sites of this kind reward careful attention from those who know to look, and that their presence in the landscape is a reminder of how much private loss went unrecorded by the official record of any era.