These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered, under Catholic doctrine, ineligible for consecrated ground. They occupy a particular and melancholy niche in Irish social and religious history, neither fully sacred nor fully secular, set apart from parish cemeteries and often positioned at boundaries: the edges of townlands, old ringforts, or remote coastal margins.

The cillín tradition reflects the long shadow of the doctrine of limbo, which held that souls who died without baptism could not enter heaven. For rural families, particularly from the medieval period through to the twentieth century, this created an agonising practical problem. Infants who died at birth or shortly after, as well as stillborn children, were frequently buried in these separate, unofficial plots rather than in the churchyard. The locations chosen were often places already understood to carry some older sanctity, pre-Christian burial sites or the ruins of early ecclesiastical enclosures, as if the ground itself might offer some alternative form of blessing. The site at Bun An Churraigh, in a part of Mayo shaped by both Gaelic tradition and the hardships of post-Famine rural life, would have served the local community in precisely this way.

Beyond its classification and location, the specific history of this particular site remains, for now, incompletely documented. What is certain is that such places are increasingly recognised across Ireland not as sites of shame or concealment, but as memorials to lives that were mourned privately when they could not be mourned publicly, and to the communities that tended them with quiet, unofficial care.