These were the cillíní, informal burial grounds found across Ireland, typically used for unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and others considered outside the bounds of the Church. The site at Shanclogh is one such place, its numerous graves identifiable only by the unworked stones set into the earth above them, modest and unlettered.

The burial ground sits immediately to the south of a church that may have medieval origins, and it was the graveyard associated with that older structure which, in more recent times, became the site of these children's interments. Researchers Korff and O'Connell, writing in 1985, noted its use as a children's burial ground, placing its repurposing within living or near-living memory. The precise span of its use is not documented, but the presence of numerous graves suggests it served this function across several generations, the plain limestone markers recording, in their silence, a great many small losses.