These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants, stillborn children, and others excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic Church practice. They were typically quiet, marginal places, located at townland boundaries, old ruins, or ancient earthworks, chosen not randomly but according to a folk logic that placed the unbaptised at the edge of the sanctioned world without abandoning them entirely.

The practice of burying children in cillíní was widespread in Ireland from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, though the custom faded as Church attitudes shifted and infant baptism became more readily accessible. The grief surrounding these burials was often silent; families mourned privately, and the sites received little formal commemoration. Many cillíní are now overgrown, unmarked, or known only to local families whose ancestors carried small bodies there at night or in the early morning. The Sileshaun site is one of hundreds recorded across Clare and the wider country, each one a quiet node in a geography of loss that rarely makes it into mainstream historical accounts.