These places, known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), are among the most quietly sorrowful features of the Irish rural landscape. For centuries, children who died before baptism were refused burial in consecrated ground by the Catholic Church, and so families interred them in marginal spaces: the edges of fields, old ringforts, coastal promontories, and unconsecrated plots that existed outside the boundaries of parish graveyards. Callanafersy has one such place.

Cillíní are found in their hundreds across Ireland, and Kerry has a particularly significant number given the density of early Christian and medieval settlement along its coastline and peninsulas. The practice of burying unbaptised infants in these separate grounds persisted in some areas well into the twentieth century, making cillíní not merely medieval curiosities but living features of fairly recent memory. Many are marked by nothing more than small stones, unmarked and unrecorded in any formal sense, though they were known intimately by the families and communities who used them. The location at Callanafersy fits within this broader pattern of quiet, unofficial commemoration that characterises so much of rural Irish burial practice.