These places are known in Irish as cilliní (singular: cillín), small unconsecrated plots where, for centuries, unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal Catholic burial were interred. The practice was widespread, shaped by a theological rule that denied church burial to children who died before baptism, and it left behind hundreds of these modest, often unmarked enclosures across the country, many of them forgotten beneath grass and bramble.

Cilliní occupy a complicated place in Irish social and religious history. From the early medieval period onward, the boundaries of consecrated ground carried enormous weight, and those who fell outside them, whether unbaptised infants, suicides, shipwreck victims, or strangers of unknown faith, were buried apart. Families had little choice but to find alternative ground, and they often chose liminal spaces: old ringfort earthworks, early monastic enclosures, or simply a field corner away from the parish churchyard. The grief attached to these places was largely private, unacknowledged by official religion, and the sites themselves went unrecorded for generations. It is only relatively recently that archaeologists and local historians have begun to document them in any systematic way. The Carrowgallda site is one of many such monuments across Mayo that have been formally identified as part of the archaeological record, though the details of its precise condition, extent, and any surviving physical features remain to be fully documented.