The practice itself was not unusual in Ireland; Catholic doctrine long held that babies who died before baptism could not be interred in consecrated ground, and so communities across the country repurposed older, liminal spaces for the purpose. Raths, the circular earthwork enclosures built primarily during the early medieval period as farmsteads and settlements, carried their own ambiguous spiritual charge in folk memory, neither fully sacred nor entirely profane, which may partly explain why they were so often chosen for this use.

At Ballyglass, local tradition preserves the memory of this function clearly. Small stone gravemarkers were still visible within the rath during the first half of the twentieth century, physical traces of burials that were never officially recorded or religiously sanctioned. Those markers are no longer visible today. Their disappearance is common to many such sites across Ireland, sometimes the result of agricultural disturbance, sometimes simply the slow work of vegetation and time. What remains is the earthwork itself and the oral memory attached to it, the knowledge passed down that this particular enclosure served as the last resting place for children whose deaths placed their families in an impossible position between grief and the formal structures of the Church.

These burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, occupy a peculiar and often overlooked corner of the Irish landscape. They are rarely marked on maps, seldom interpreted on signage, and frequently sit within or beside older archaeological features precisely because such places already existed outside ordinary social and religious boundaries. The rath at Ballyglass is one of many across Mayo and beyond where the landscape holds two histories at once, one prehistoric, one far more recent and considerably more tender.