These burial sites, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were a fixture of the rural Irish landscape for centuries. Canon law held that those who died without baptism could not be buried in consecrated ground, and so communities created their own quiet, unofficial places for infants and stillborn children, often at the margins of fields, on the boundaries of townlands, near ruined early medieval churches, or at the edge of the sea. Carrowmore has one such place.

The practice of cillín burial was widespread from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, and the sites were rarely marked with headstones. Grief was largely silent here. Parents knew where their children lay, and that knowledge passed between generations, but the locations were seldom recorded officially or commemorated publicly. In recent decades there has been a quiet movement across Ireland to document, protect, and acknowledge these places, which had long existed outside the formal record. The one at Carrowmore is among the many that have been identified as archaeological monuments worthy of protection, even where the documentary history remains thin.