In a stretch of level grassland at Shantallow in County Galway, there is said to be a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a place where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were quietly interred, often at the margins of fields, beside old walls, or near ancient monuments. No surface trace survives here. There is no enclosure, no scatter of small stones, no worn hollow in the earth to suggest what may lie beneath. The site is known only because local tradition says it was there.

What gives the location its particular character is its proximity to a place already layered with folklore. The burial ground lies roughly 130 metres north of a site known locally as the Gobbaun Seer's House, a name that carries the echo of Goibhniu, the divine craftsman of Irish mythology, though the precise nature of that nearby monument is a separate matter. The pairing of a legendary figure's dwelling with an unmarked children's cemetery nearby is the kind of quiet accident of geography that tends to accumulate meaning over generations, even when the physical evidence has long since disappeared into the grass.