Known in Irish as a cillín (the plural is cilliní), these were informal or unconsecrated burial places used for infants who died before baptism, as well as for others considered outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church. For centuries, such children could not be buried in consecrated ground according to Church teaching, and so families turned to older, liminal spaces: the margins of fields, ancient earthworks, cliff edges, and forgotten monastic enclosures. The grief was real; the geography was its own kind of record.

Cilliní are found across the Irish landscape in their hundreds, and their distribution reflects not just religious practice but the deeper social history of rural communities navigating loss under particular theological and institutional pressures. The tradition persisted well into the twentieth century in some areas, long after official attitudes had begun to soften. Many cilliní occupy sites with an earlier sacred or ritual significance, suggesting a folk memory of sanctified ground that outlasted the structures originally built upon it. The specific history of the Furroor site, including when it was last used and by which families, has not yet been fully documented in the public record.