These sites, known in Irish as cilliní (singular cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered to exist outside the boundaries of formal Catholic burial rites. Because the Church denied consecrated ground to those who had not received baptism, families turned instead to marginal or liminal spaces: old ring-forts, the edges of bogs, sea cliffs, and ancient ecclesiastical sites whose sanctity predated the parish system. A cillín offered something unofficial but deeply human, a place where grief could be marked even when the institution would not permit it.

Noughaval itself has early medieval ecclesiastical associations, sitting within the Burren landscape of north Clare, an area with a particularly dense concentration of ancient monuments. The parish name derives from the Irish Nuachongbháil, meaning roughly a new monastic foundation or settlement, and the area around the old church contains fabric and features spanning many centuries. Children's burial grounds attached to or near such sites were often positioned deliberately close to earlier sacred ground, reflecting a folk belief that proximity to old holiness might offer some protection or blessing to those the institutional Church had left unacknowledged. The graves in cilliní are typically unmarked or indicated only by small stones, which means the physical evidence on the ground is easily overlooked by anyone who does not know what they are looking at.