These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered, under Catholic tradition, ineligible for burial in consecrated ground. They occupy a particular kind of threshold space, neither fully sacred nor entirely overlooked, often sited at old boundaries, on the edges of bogs, beside ruined churches, or in corners of fields where the ordinary rules of the landscape seemed briefly suspended.

The practice of burying unbaptised children in such separate, unconsecrated ground was widespread in Ireland from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, shaped by the theological doctrine of limbo and the social pressures that surrounded infant death. Families who lost a child before baptism had few options within the formal church, and cillíní became the quiet, practical answer. Many are marked by nothing more than small stones, if that, and their locations were passed down through local knowledge rather than formal record. The site at Sáile represents one node in this broader, largely unwritten geography of grief.