Cilliní were informal burial grounds used, from medieval times well into the twentieth century, for individuals who could not be interred in consecrated ground under Catholic canon law. This included unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and sometimes strangers or those who had died by suicide. The very existence of such places was rarely spoken of openly, and many have no formal markers at all, their locations preserved only in local memory passed quietly between generations.

Children's burial grounds of this type are found across Clare and throughout Ireland, often sited at liminal places considered to occupy a kind of threshold, field boundaries, the edges of old ringforts, shorelines, or spots associated with earlier, pre-Christian use. The grief surrounding cilliní was compounded by the silence the Church imposed on the families who used them. Parents buried their children quickly and without ceremony, sometimes at night, and the sites were rarely spoken of afterwards. That reticence began to shift in recent decades, as communities across Ireland started to locate, document, and in some cases memorialise these grounds, recognising the weight of sorrow they carry.