The one at Keerhaunmore, in County Galway, is among these quietly significant sites, occupying a category of place that shaped the emotional and spiritual geography of rural Ireland for centuries.

Cillíní were not born of cruelty but of theological convention. Under Catholic doctrine as it was practiced in Ireland, children who died before baptism could not be buried in a parish churchyard, as they were considered to have died outside the state of grace. Communities responded by finding liminal spaces, field boundaries, the edges of older ruins, coastal margins, or ground already regarded as ancient and somehow set apart. These sites were tended privately, with little ceremony, and rarely appeared in official records. Keerhaunmore, in the west of Galway, sits within a landscape where such traditions persisted long into the modern era, and where the density of archaeological sites reflects centuries of continuous, layered habitation.