Yet local tradition long identified this quietly elevated ground as a place where unbaptised children were laid to rest, apart from the consecrated earth reserved for those who had received the sacrament.

These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were once widespread across Ireland. Catholic doctrine historically held that children who died without baptism could not be buried in consecrated ground, and so communities found their own solutions, often choosing liminal or ancient-feeling places: old ruins, field boundaries, shorelines, or low mounds with long sight lines like this one. At Ballynilard, the Ordnance Survey letters compiled by O'Flanagan record the local tradition explicitly, noting that the practice had ceased by 1840. The ground sits close to a church and a cross, and roughly 257 metres to the northwest lies a holy well, a proximity that suggests this corner of Tipperary carried considerable ritual significance across different periods. Whether the mound's elevation made it feel set apart, or whether some older, pre-Christian association drew people to it, is now impossible to say.

Nothing marks the spot today. The grass grows over whatever lies beneath, and the views outward in all directions give the place an exposed, unhurried quality. It is the kind of site that asks for a certain attentiveness, since there is nothing to see so much as something to understand about the people who once made quiet, unsanctioned decisions here about where the very young should rest.