These grounds are known in Irish as cillíní, and they served for centuries as informal, unconsecrated burial places for infants who died before baptism, as well as for others considered ineligible for burial in sanctified ground. The Catholic Church's doctrine of limbo held that unbaptised children could not enter heaven, and so their families, unwilling to leave them entirely unremembered, created these marginal spaces, often at the edges of fields, beside ancient earthworks, or along parish boundaries.

Cillíní are among the more quietly melancholy features of the Irish countryside. They are rarely marked by headstones, and their locations were passed down through local knowledge rather than formal record. Many occupy ground that already carried some sense of antiquity or spiritual significance, old ringfort ditches, early medieval enclosures, or the ruins of pre-Norman churches. The choice was rarely arbitrary. In Clare, as elsewhere, such sites could remain in use from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, their continued existence depending entirely on community memory. Moyglass More is a small rural townland, and its children's burial ground represents this wider tradition, a place where grief found its own quiet geography outside the structures of official religion.