These places are known in Irish as cillíní, singular cillín, and they served a specific and sorrowful purpose: the burial of unbaptised infants, who, under Catholic doctrine as it was practised for centuries, were considered ineligible for consecrated ground. Excluded from parish cemeteries, they were instead laid in marginal spaces, old ring-forts, boundary ditches, shorelines, and abandoned early medieval enclosures, places already set apart from the ordinary world.

The practice was widespread in Ireland from at least the medieval period and continued in some areas well into the twentieth century. The choice of location was rarely arbitrary. Cillíní were often sited at places already understood to be liminal or ancient, ground that existed at the edge of the parish, the edge of the farm, the edge of legible history. Ballydonaghan sits in the Burren region of Clare, a landscape whose limestone geology and layered human occupation stretch back thousands of years, and where the boundaries between the very old and the relatively recent are rarely clean. The specific history of this particular site, including when it was first used, how long it remained in use, and what physical form it takes today, is not currently documented in accessible records.