These were informal, unconsecrated plots used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and occasionally others considered ineligible for burial in sanctified ground under Catholic Church rules. They are among the more quietly sombre features of the Irish rural landscape, often tucked into field corners, old ringfort enclosures, or early medieval ecclesiastical sites, and they exist in the hundreds across the country.

The practice of burying unbaptised children apart from the community cemetery was rooted in the theological doctrine that those who died without baptism could not enter heaven, and therefore could not be laid to rest in consecrated soil. For rural families, a cillín offered a practical and compassionate alternative, a place close to home where a child could be interred with some degree of care, even if without formal rites. The locations chosen were often liminal in character, old and already associated with the dead or the sacred, whether the earthworks of an ancient enclosure or the margins of a holy well. In time, many of these sites were quietly forgotten, or their significance became known only within the immediate locality. Corrakyle, a small townland in Clare, is one of many such places across the county where this practice left a physical, if understated, trace in the land.