These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered ineligible for burial in sanctified ground, including stillborn children, the unbaptised, and occasionally suicides or strangers. They occupy a particular and melancholy corner of Irish rural life, neither fully sacred nor wholly secular, existing in a kind of liminal space that reflected the theological anxieties of their time.

The practice of burying unbaptised children in separate, marginal locations, often ancient ringforts, coastal erosion edges, or lonely field boundaries, was widespread across Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century. Catholic doctrine held that infants who died without baptism could not enter heaven, and so the church would not permit their burial in consecrated ground. Families, unwilling to leave their children entirely uncommemorated, turned instead to older, pre-Christian sites or simply to quiet corners of the landscape. Cillíní are found in their hundreds across Connacht, and Mayo in particular has a high concentration of them, a reflection both of the county's historically high rural poverty and the scale of infant mortality that accompanied it. The grief attached to these places was largely unspoken, processed in private rather than through formal mourning rituals.

Keenagh Beg is a small townland, and the burial ground there would likely be modest and easy to overlook, as most cillíní are. They rarely feature headstones; small unmarked stones, slight ground depressions, or simply the memory of local families often constitute the only evidence of what lies beneath. Visiting such a site asks a certain attentiveness from the observer, an awareness that the absence of visible memorial is itself part of the history.