These burial grounds, known in Irish tradition as cilliní (the singular is cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered to exist outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church. Because church law historically denied such individuals consecrated ground, families turned to liminal spaces: old ringfort ditches, the edges of ancient ecclesiastical sites, shorelines, and forgotten corners of fields. A cillín is not simply a sad footnote to religious regulation; it speaks to an entire parallel geography of grief, one that persisted in rural Ireland well into the twentieth century.

The site at Kilbreckan sits within a part of Clare that carries considerable early medieval ecclesiastical significance, the place name itself deriving from the Irish for the church or cell of Breacán, a figure associated with early Christian settlement in the region. Children's burial grounds were frequently established close to pre-Norman ecclesiastical enclosures, partly from a folk belief that proximity to ancient holy ground offered some spiritual protection, even outside the boundaries of formal sanctification. The precise history of this particular site remains undocumented in publicly available sources, but its existence is recorded as a monument in its own right, placing it within a broader national pattern of such sites that archaeologists and folklore scholars have worked to map and understand over recent decades.