These sites are known in Irish tradition as cillíní, small and usually unconsecrated plots where, for centuries, unbaptised infants were laid to rest outside the boundaries of churchyard ground. Catholic doctrine, as it was practised in Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, held that a child who died before baptism could not be buried in consecrated earth. And so, in fields, on the margins of bogs, at old boundaries, or beside ruins of pre-Christian or early Christian enclosures, families buried their smallest dead as close to sanctified ground as the rules would allow, often in silence, often without formal record.

Cillíní are among the more melancholy categories of monument in the Irish landscape. They are frequently unmarked by anything more than a slight rise in the earth, a scattering of small stones, or a tradition held in local memory. The site at Formoyle Oughteragh belongs to this category, a place shaped less by construction than by grief repeated quietly across generations. The townland name itself combines Formoyle, derived from the Irish for a rounded hill, with Oughteragh, the name of a historic parish stretching across a portion of north Clare, an area of limestone upland and glacial drift familiar to anyone who has moved through the Burren's outer margins.