For centuries, these were the quiet, unofficial resting places of unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and others considered ineligible for burial in consecrated ground under Catholic Church practice. The one at Gortbofarna, in County Clare, is among this widespread but frequently overlooked category of archaeological monument, a landscape feature that says as much about historical religious practice and social grief as it does about any particular event or individual.

The theology behind cillíní was rooted in the doctrine of limbo, which held that unbaptised children could not enter heaven and therefore could not be buried in the church graveyard. Families, left with few options, interred their infants in these separate plots, often on old monastic sites, at boundaries, near water, or on land thought to occupy some ambiguous spiritual territory. The practice was widespread from the medieval period onward and continued in parts of rural Ireland well into the twentieth century. Clare, with its dense concentration of early Christian sites and its deeply rural character, has numerous examples. The Gortbofarna site sits within this broader pattern, though the specific details of its use and history have not yet been fully documented in the public record.