No names, no dates, no epitaphs. The graves are anonymous by design, or at least by custom, and the site is known locally by the Irish term cillíneach, a word that points to a practice once common across rural Ireland: the burial of unbaptised children in liminal, unconsecrated ground.

Cillíní (the plural form) occupy a peculiar position in the Irish landscape and in Irish religious history. Catholic doctrine, as it was understood and applied for centuries, held that infants who died without baptism could not be buried in consecrated churchyards. Families responded by using older, pre-Christian sites, including raths, the circular earthwork enclosures built during the early medieval period as farmsteads or places of shelter. A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, was already understood as a place set apart, associated in folk memory with the otherworld and the fairy host. To bury a child there was to place them somewhere outside ordinary life but not quite abandoned either. The cillíneach at Coolnagoppoge sits within one such rath, its grave-markers small and plain, the whole area now covered by mature deciduous trees and dense undergrowth, which gives the place a quality of slow enclosure, as if the landscape itself has drawn a quiet boundary around it.