The one at Ballynacloghy in County Galway is among them. These sites occupy a particular kind of liminal space in Irish memory, neither fully sacred nor entirely forgotten, set apart by a theology that has largely receded but left its physical traces behind in field corners, coastal margins, and townland boundaries.

The practice of burying unbaptised infants outside the parish churchyard was rooted in Catholic doctrine as it was understood and applied in Ireland from the medieval period onward. Children who died before baptism were considered unable to enter heaven, and so they could not be laid in blessed earth alongside the community's dead. Families buried them instead in marginal places, old ringfort banks, cliff edges, the boundaries between townlands, or sites with pre-Christian associations. The word cillín derives from the Irish for a small church or cell, and many of these grounds occupy locations that were already considered set apart long before Christian burial customs imposed their own logic on the landscape. Ballynacloghy, a townland name suggesting a stony place, sits within a part of Galway where such survivals are not uncommon, though each site carries its own local history of grief and quiet observance.

Because the documentary record for this particular site has not yet been made widely available, the finer details of its history, its extent, any recorded finds, or the period during which it was actively used, remain difficult to establish from a distance. What can be said is that cillíní as a category were used well into the twentieth century in some parts of Ireland, and many have only recently begun to receive the formal archaeological attention they deserve.