These sites, known in Irish as cilliní (singular cillín), appear in their hundreds across the Irish landscape, yet they remain among the least visited and least discussed of the country's historic monuments. They were used, primarily from the medieval period through to the twentieth century, to inter unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic doctrine from consecrated ground. The result was a quiet, parallel geography of loss, set apart at the margins of parishes, beside old boundaries, at the edges of bogs, or near ancient earthworks.

The choice of burial location was rarely arbitrary. Cilliní were often placed at sites already considered liminal or anciently sacred, old ringfort ditches, forgotten monastic enclosures, or simply ground that lay outside the jurisdiction of the parish church. The name Knockaphreaghaun itself suggests a small hill or knoll, the kind of slightly elevated, marginal ground that communities across Clare and beyond repeatedly chose for this purpose. Without baptism, the Church held that infants could not enter heaven, and so they could not enter the churchyard either. Families buried their children quietly, often at night, in places that existed in a kind of spiritual in-between. The grief was real; the ritual was unofficial.

Because the source material for this particular site is limited, specific details about its history, layout, or any associated finds remain unavailable. What can be said is that its existence in the record places it among a category of monument that has attracted growing interest from archaeologists and historians in recent decades, as researchers reckon more honestly with the social and emotional history that these small, unmarked plots represent.