Yet local knowledge identifies it as a burial ground, specifically one set aside for unbaptised children, a category of the dead who occupied a deeply uneasy place in Irish Catholic practice for centuries.

These sites are known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), and they appear across the country in their hundreds, sometimes thousands. Because Catholic doctrine long held that unbaptised infants could not enter heaven and were therefore ineligible for burial in consecrated ground, families turned instead to liminal spaces: the edges of townlands, old ringfort interiors, shorelines, and small rises in bog or farmland like this one. The choice of a slight elevation in otherwise marshy ground was not arbitrary. Such spots were often considered to sit outside ordinary domestic or agricultural space, occupying a kind of threshold that made them, in local understanding, appropriate for those who existed between the fully living and the fully saved. No formal ceremony accompanied these burials, and no markers were raised, which is why so many cillíní survive only as place-memory rather than visible archaeology. At Derryvunlam, that is precisely the situation: the ground holds its dead without any surface evidence that they are there at all.