A cashel is a stone ringfort, a type of early medieval enclosure typically built as a farmstead, its circular wall offering protection to those who lived within. Here, local tradition holds that the enclosed ground served a very different, and much quieter, purpose.

The practice of burying unbaptised children outside consecrated ground was common across Ireland for centuries, a consequence of Catholic doctrine that excluded those who died before baptism from burial in parish cemeteries. Such sites, known as cillíní, were often placed in liminal spots: old earthworks, ringforts, coastal margins, or forgotten field boundaries. The cashel at Castletaylor fits that pattern. According to local information, its interior may have functioned as one of these informal burial grounds, though no visible surface trace of graves has been recorded. The absence of any mark above ground is itself characteristic. These were not places of monument or ceremony, but of quiet, often sorrowful, necessity.