These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), were informal burial grounds used for unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and sometimes others considered outside the boundaries of consecrated ground, including suicides and strangers. Catholic doctrine, as it was applied in rural Ireland for centuries, held that unbaptised souls could not enter heaven and therefore could not be buried in the parish churchyard. Families carried their children instead to liminal places, the edges of townlands, old ring-forts, or sites with some older, pre-Christian resonance.

The name Eochair Na Gcailleach is itself quietly strange. The word cailleach in Irish carries layers of meaning, referring to old women, nuns, or in older usage, supernatural hag figures associated with landscape and weather. Whether the name here reflects a memory of a religious community, a local figure, or something older is not recorded. What survives is the place itself, a children's burial ground in a county that has more than its share of such sites, many of them unmarked, many known only to the families who once used them and the neighbours who passed the knowledge down.