Known in Irish as cillíní, these sites were the practical answer to a painful theological problem: until relatively recently, Catholic doctrine held that infants who died before baptism could not be interred in consecrated ground. The result was a geography of grief, often tucked into old earthworks, field margins, or liminal spots at the edges of settled land. This example in Lissard, in the flat farmland of north County Galway, is one such place, modest in scale and easy to overlook.

By 1933, when the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it, the site appeared as a small circular enclosure roughly ten metres in diameter. That circular form has since been lost. What survives today is a roughly square area of the same dimensions, poorly preserved and no longer enclosed, in which several alignments of small, set limestone boulders mark graves oriented north to south. The use of local limestone as grave markers, rather than inscribed headstones, is typical of cillíní, where formal commemoration was often absent or deliberately understated. The site sits approximately 180 metres south of a ringfort, one of those familiar circular earthwork enclosures built for early medieval farmsteads, and the proximity is unlikely to be coincidental; cillíní were frequently established at or near pre-existing ancient monuments, places already understood to be outside ordinary social and religious boundaries. A hawthorn tree now grows in the western half of the enclosure, its presence adding to the slightly otherworldly quality these sites often carry, hawthorns having their own long association in Irish tradition with thresholds and the uncanny.