These sites, known in Irish tradition as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants, and sometimes of others considered ineligible for consecrated ground, including stillborn babies, suicides, and strangers whose origins were unknown. The cillín was a solution to a theological and social problem: Catholic doctrine held that those who died without baptism could not be buried in hallowed earth, and so communities found their own places, often at the margins of townlands, beside old earthworks, on the edges of bogs, or at sites with some pre-Christian resonance. The graves were rarely marked with anything permanent, and the burials were carried out quietly, sometimes at night, by families carrying a grief that was expected not to be spoken of too loudly.

The Lakyle example sits within this widespread but under-documented tradition. Such sites are found in their hundreds across Ireland, many recorded only in local memory or identified through chance finds during agricultural work. The landscape around Lakyle, in the barony of Tullagh, retains traces of earlier settlement and land use, and a cillín here would have served the surrounding rural community through the centuries when the practice was most common, roughly from the medieval period through to the early twentieth century, when attitudes and canonical rules began to shift. The very discretion that surrounded these burials has made them difficult to study; they were not intended to leave a conspicuous mark.