These places, known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), were set aside for the interment of unbaptised infants, and occasionally others considered to exist outside the boundaries of consecrated ground, including stillborn children, strangers whose origins were unknown, and sometimes suicides. They occupy a peculiar position in the landscape, neither parish graveyard nor wilderness, and for centuries they were maintained through communal understanding rather than official recognition.

The practice of burying unbaptised children apart from the main graveyard was rooted in the theology of limbo, the doctrinal position, since revised by the Catholic Church, that souls who died without baptism could not enter heaven. In rural Ireland this translated into a geography of exclusion, with families carrying infants by night to ancient raths, coastal margins, or the boundaries of fields, places already marked as liminal by older belief or earlier use. Páirc An Doire, whose name suggests an oak grove or wooded enclosure, fits a pattern seen across Connacht, where field names often preserve a memory of what the land once held or once meant. The specific history of this particular site remains largely undocumented in publicly available sources, but its existence as a recorded monument places it within a wider network of such grounds that archaeologists and folklorists have been working to map and understand across the island.

Cillíní can be difficult to identify on the ground. They are rarely marked by headstones, more often indicated by slight undulations in a field surface, a cluster of small stones, or simply by local knowledge passed from one generation to the next. In Mayo, as elsewhere, many such sites are now known only by name, the physical traces modest enough to be overlooked entirely without prior awareness of what to look for.