The one at Ross in County Clare belongs to a tradition known in Irish as cillíní, small unconsecrated plots where, for centuries, unbaptised infants and others considered outside the bounds of formal Catholic burial were interred. Because the Church denied these children a place in consecrated ground, families turned to older, liminal spaces, field boundaries, ancient ringforts, or simply quiet corners of land away from the parish churchyard.

The practice was bound up with a theological doctrine, limbo, which held that souls who died without baptism could not enter heaven. Though the doctrine was never formally defined as dogma, it shaped popular belief and parish custom in Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century. Stillborn children, those who died before a priest could be reached, and occasionally adults who fell outside Church norms, were quietly buried in these places, often at night and without ceremony. The grief was real and private; the burial was a practical and sorrowful solution. Many cillíní are associated with pre-Christian sites, partly because such places already carried a sense of the sacred or the set-apart, and partly because they lay outside the jurisdiction of the institutional Church. The Ross site fits within this broader pattern, one of hundreds of such grounds recorded across Clare and the wider country.