Known in Irish tradition as a cillín (sometimes spelled cilleen), these were informal burial places set aside for unbaptised infants, and occasionally others considered to exist outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church. Because unbaptised children were believed to be ineligible for consecrated ground, families buried them instead in liminal spaces, old ringforts, abandoned medieval church sites, coastal dunes, or field boundaries, places that existed somehow apart from the ordinary world of the living.

The practice was widespread across Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and Clare has a notable concentration of such sites. The locations were chosen with care, often carrying a pre-Christian or ambiguous sacred quality, and they were maintained largely through local memory rather than any official record. In many communities, knowledge of the cillín passed quietly from one generation to the next, a private geography of grief that rarely appeared on maps or in parish registers. The Fomerla site is one such place, recorded as a monument but currently without detailed documentation available in the public domain.