The one at Culliagh Beg, in County Galway, belongs to this quietly sorrowful tradition. Known in Irish as a cillín, plural cilliní, these were informal burial places used for infants who died before baptism, and occasionally for others considered ineligible for a Catholic churchyard, including stillborn babies, strangers, and sometimes suicides. The Church's doctrine of limbo, which held that unbaptised souls could not enter heaven, meant that grieving families had to bury their children in unconsecrated land, often at the edges of fields, beside ancient earthworks, or on the margins of townlands.

Cilliní are found throughout Ireland in their hundreds, and Galway has a particularly dense concentration of them. They tend to occupy liminal spaces, old ringfort interiors, coastal headlands, or the corners of fields that were never quite incorporated into the working farmscape. The site at Culliagh Beg is one such place, its precise history presently undocumented in publicly available form. What is known is that these grounds were used well into the twentieth century in some parts of rural Ireland, long after official Church teaching began to soften, simply because the custom had become embedded in local practice and local grief. Burials were typically carried out at night or at dawn, without ceremony, by the father or a small group of neighbours, and the graves were rarely marked with anything permanent.