The one at Lissadrone in County Mayo belongs to a category of site that reflects one of the more sorrowful aspects of Irish religious and social history: the cillín, a term for unconsecrated ground used to inter those who, under Catholic practice, were denied burial in blessed soil. The most common occupants were unbaptised infants, though stillborn children, suicide victims, and strangers of unknown faith were sometimes buried here too. These sites occupy a particular kind of silence in the landscape, neither fully remembered nor entirely forgotten.

The practice of separating unbaptised children from the main body of the dead was rooted in the doctrine of limbo, which held that infants who died before baptism could not enter heaven, and therefore could not be buried in ground consecrated for that purpose. Families, unwilling to leave their children without any rite of passage, adapted. Cilliní were established in ringforts, on the margins of old monastic enclosures, at townland boundaries, and in other liminal spaces that carried a sense of antiquity and, perhaps, a kind of unofficial sanctity. The Lissadrone site sits within this broader tradition, a piece of County Mayo ground that absorbed grief quietly, outside the formal structures of parish and church.