The one at Maigh Raithin in County Mayo belongs to a category of burial site known in Irish as a cillín, a consecrated but unofficial space where unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered outside the formal embrace of the Church, were laid to rest. Because the Catholic Church long denied such children burial in consecrated ground, families turned instead to liminal places, field boundaries, old ringfort interiors, coastal dunes, or spots already freighted with pre-Christian association. These were acts of quiet grief rather than defiance, and the sites they produced are among the more melancholy features of the Irish rural landscape.

The practice was widespread from at least the medieval period and persisted in parts of rural Ireland well into the twentieth century. The theological reasoning rested on the doctrine of original sin and the requirement of baptism for salvation, a position that left bereaved parents in an impossible position and communities improvising in response. Cillíní are found in every county, sometimes in their hundreds, and Mayo, with its density of rural parishes and its long history of poverty and remoteness, has a significant number of recorded examples. The site at Maigh Raithin is one such place, carrying within it the particular silence that attends these grounds.