These sites are commonly known as cillíní, from the Irish word for a small church or cell, and they served a specific and sorrowful purpose: the burial of unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic doctrine from consecrated ground. For centuries, families brought their children to these liminal places, set apart from the parish churchyard, often at townland boundaries, old monastic sites, or beside ancient earthworks.

The practice of burying unbaptised children in separate, unconsecrated ground was widespread in Ireland from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century. The theology behind it held that without baptism a child could not enter heaven, and so could not lie in ground blessed by the Church. In response, communities quietly maintained their own alternative spaces, places that existed outside official religious geography but carried a weight of private grief and local memory. Cillíní were rarely marked with headstones, which makes them easy to overlook and difficult to date with precision. The Flagmount site is one of many such places recorded across Clare, a county where the landscape holds a remarkable density of early Christian and prehistoric remains alongside these more intimate, less celebrated monuments.