What marks it as different is its purpose: this is a cillín, a type of unconsecrated ground where, for centuries, unbaptised infants were laid to rest. Because Catholic doctrine long held that children who died before baptism could not enter consecrated ground, communities across Ireland quietly maintained these separate spaces, often on marginal land, old boundaries, or ancient earthworks. They were rarely marked with formal headstones, and many survive now as slight rises or enclosed patches of rough ground, identifiable more through local memory than through any visible monument.

Cilliní are among the more melancholy features of the Irish rural landscape, and their distribution across Mayo is extensive. The practice of burying unbaptised children outside the church was widespread from the medieval period onward and continued in some areas into the twentieth century. The name Dumha Locha contains the Irish word dumha, meaning a mound or burial mound, which suggests the site may have older associations, possibly pre-Christian, before it came to serve its later function. That layering of use across time is common to many such places in the west of Ireland, where early earthworks were repurposed by later communities who recognised in them a quality of separateness from ordinary ground.