These places are known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), and they served a painful purpose: the burial of unbaptised infants, who, under Catholic doctrine as it was historically interpreted, could not be interred in consecrated ground. Excluded from the parish churchyard, families brought their children to marginal spaces, old pre-Christian enclosures, field boundaries, coastal strands, or simply remote corners of land that existed somehow outside the ordinary. The grief involved was real, and so was the social isolation that surrounded it.

Cillíní are found the length and breadth of Ireland, and Clare has its share. They tend to occupy liminal ground, places neither fully domestic nor fully wild, and Derreendooagh is consistent with that pattern. The practice of burying unbaptised children separately persisted well into the twentieth century in some areas, though attitudes shifted gradually as communities found quieter ways to accommodate private sorrow. Many of these sites went unrecorded for generations, known only to local families and occasionally marked by small uninscribed stones. The Derreendooagh site belongs to this category of place, recognised as a monument but carrying its history lightly, without the apparatus of interpretation boards or formal enclosure.