These sites, found in many parts of Ireland, are known as cilliní, informal and often ancient plots where unbaptised infants were laid to rest. Church law long excluded the unbaptised from burial in sanctified soil, so families found other places: old ringfort ditches, the margins of bogs, the edges of fields, or early medieval enclosures whose pre-Christian associations made them feel, in some quiet way, outside the usual religious order. The name Dumha Éige suggests an older landscape layer beneath the burial ground; dumha is an Irish word for a burial mound or earthen ridge, hinting that this location may have carried funerary significance long before it became a cillín.

The practice of burying unbaptised children in such places persisted in Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, shaped by a theology that placed these infants in a state called limbo, neither condemned nor admitted to heaven. For families, the grief was compounded by the absence of a formal funeral rite. Cilliní were rarely marked with inscribed headstones; instead, small fieldstones, sometimes barely visible above the grass, served as the only memorial. The location at Dumha Éige, in the west of Mayo, fits a wider pattern along the Atlantic seaboard where such grounds occupy liminal spots, neither fully inside nor outside the community's sacred geography.