These places are known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), informal burial grounds set apart from consecrated churchyards, used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and others excluded from Catholic burial rites. They tend to occupy liminal ground: field boundaries, the edges of bogs, the margins of older ecclesiastical sites, or simply a quiet corner of a farm that accumulated a quiet, unspoken significance over generations.

The theology behind their use was severe. Under Catholic doctrine as practised in Ireland from the medieval period through much of the twentieth century, an unbaptised child who died could not be buried in sanctified ground, as baptism was considered necessary for salvation. Families, unwilling to leave their infants entirely unmarked, turned to these alternative spaces instead. The result was a distributed network of small, often unmarked plots scattered across the Irish countryside, sometimes containing dozens of burials accumulated over several centuries. Fahburren, in the west of Mayo, is one such place, its precise history and physical character currently undocumented in the public record.