These were the places where, for centuries, unbaptised children were quietly interred, outside the walls of consecrated ground and therefore, in the theology of the time, outside the reach of Christian burial rites. The one recorded at Ballymacdonnell in County Clare belongs to this tradition, a category of site that is at once deeply commonplace in the Irish landscape and almost entirely invisible to the casual eye.

Cillíní reflect a practice rooted in early and medieval Christian doctrine, which held that infants who died before baptism could not be buried in parish graveyards. Families instead used liminal spaces, old ring forts, the edges of bogs, early medieval enclosures, or simply a quiet corner of land, to lay their children to rest. The burials were typically unmarked, or marked only with a small stone, and the sites were rarely recorded formally. In County Clare, as elsewhere in the west of Ireland, the tradition persisted well into the twentieth century. The specific history of the Ballymacdonnell site, its precise boundaries, any associated finds, or the period during which it was in use, remains to be fully documented.

Because the detailed record for this site has not yet been made publicly available, visiting with any expectation of interpretation would likely be frustrating. These sites tend to reward a different kind of attention, an awareness of what the landscape is holding rather than displaying, and some knowledge of the broader tradition before arrival.