These small, informal burial grounds are among the most quietly significant archaeological features of the Irish landscape. For centuries, unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church, were interred not in consecrated churchyards but in marginal spaces: field boundaries, ringfort interiors, coastal strands, or low-lying ground near water. The choice of location was rarely random. It reflected a folk theology that placed these children in a liminal state, neither fully of this world nor fully admitted to the next, and communities responded with their own quiet rituals of burial and remembrance.

Cillíní are found across every county in Ireland, and Galway has a particular concentration of them, a reflection of both the density of rural settlement and the persistence of pre-Reformation and folk Catholic practice well into the modern period. The word cillín derives from the Irish for a small church or cell, and the sites often cluster near ancient ecclesiastical remains, though they could equally appear in fields with no obvious religious association. Their use continued, in some areas, into the twentieth century. What distinguishes a children's burial ground from an ordinary early medieval enclosure or field feature is often only the folk memory attached to it; above ground, the markers, if any existed, were typically small and perishable, and the sites can be easy to overlook entirely without local knowledge. The one at Cloondoyle More is recorded as a monument, placing it within a longer tradition of such sites across the west of Ireland, though the specific details of its history remain to be fully documented.