These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for burial in consecrated ground, including stillborn children and occasionally suicides or strangers. They occupy a strange liminal space in the landscape, neither fully sacred nor entirely forgotten, often marked by little more than small unlettered stones or a slight rise in a field.

Cillíní are found across Ireland in their hundreds, and Clare has more than its share. Their use reflects the theological position, long held by the Catholic Church, that unbaptised souls could not enter heaven and therefore could not lie in parish ground. Families, unwilling to leave their infants entirely uncommemorated, turned instead to older, pre-Christian burial places, to the edges of raths and ringforts, to lonely field boundaries, or to spots already carrying some faint residue of sanctity. The practice continued well into the twentieth century in some parts of the country, meaning these are not merely medieval curiosities but sites connected to living memory in many communities.

The specific history of the Coolreagh More site, including when it was last used, what markers survive, and how it sits within the local landscape, remains to be fully documented in the public record. What can be said is that its classification as a recorded monument gives it a degree of formal recognition, and that for anyone with a connection to the area, even the act of locating it quietly in the landscape carries a certain weight.