Children's burial grounds of this kind, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborn children, suicides, or strangers whose religious status was uncertain. Because Catholic doctrine long held that the unbaptised could not enter heaven, these individuals were excluded from sacred ground, and so communities created their own quiet, liminal spaces, often at the edges of fields, beside ancient earthworks, or on land that carried a faint memory of earlier sanctity.

Cillíní are found in their hundreds across Ireland, and Clare has a considerable number. Many are unmarked or nearly so, the graves indicated by small stones laid flat rather than upright monuments, and the sites themselves can be easy to walk past without recognising what they are. The practice of burying children in such places continued in parts of rural Ireland well into the twentieth century, long after the theological pressures that originally produced it had softened in other ways. The grief attached to these sites is particular and quiet; families mourned without the framework of a public funeral, and the locations were often known within a community but seldom spoken of widely.