These grounds, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered, under the rules of the Catholic Church, ineligible for burial in consecrated ground. The locations chosen were often liminal, marginal spaces: old ringfort ditches, townland boundaries, the edges of bogs, or ground with some earlier, pre-Christian sacred association. That liminality was partly practical and partly theological, a way of placing the dead somewhere outside the parish community while still, in the minds of grieving families, keeping them close to something ancient and set apart.

The use of cillíní in Ireland stretches back at least to the early medieval period, though many continued in use well into the twentieth century. The grief surrounding them was rarely public. Burials were often carried out at night or at dawn, without clergy, without ceremony, and in silence. The sites themselves were seldom marked with headstones, which is part of why so many are now difficult to locate or identify with certainty. The Cappagha site in Clare is recorded as one such ground, though the specific history of this particular location, its period of use, the families who brought their children here, and any features that survive on the ground, are not currently documented in available sources.