These sites, known in Irish tradition as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were unconsecrated plots where unbaptised infants, and sometimes others who fell outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church, were laid to rest. They occupy a particular and quietly melancholy place in Irish rural life, tolerated rather than sanctioned, maintained by families rather than clergy, and often sited at boundaries, old raths, or the edges of consecrated ground.

The practice of burying unbaptised children separately was rooted in the theological position, long held by the Church, that an infant who died before baptism could not be interred in consecrated ground. For families, this created a painful obligation. A cillín offered a resolution of sorts, a place that was neither fully sacred nor entirely secular, where a child could be given to the earth with some degree of care and acknowledgement. The Kilcorcoran site is one of hundreds recorded across Ireland, concentrated especially in the west and midlands, and its presence in Clare fits a broader pattern of such places surviving in agricultural townlands where older ritual geographies have not been entirely erased.