It is a cillín, a term for the informal, unconsecrated burial places used across Ireland for centuries to inter those who, under Catholic Church practice, were denied burial in sanctified ground. Unbaptised infants made up the great majority of those laid here. Small, often unmarked, and frequently situated at liminal spots, such as boundaries, ancient earthworks, or lonely hillsides, cilliní are among the most quietly affecting features of the Irish landscape.

Slievemore itself carries an unusual density of history. The deserted village stretched along its southern base was occupied on a seasonal basis well into the nineteenth century, a practice known as booleying, where families moved with their cattle to upland pastures in summer. The Famine of the 1840s effectively ended that pattern of life, and the village today sits largely as it was left, a long scatter of roofless stone houses. A children's burial ground in this setting would have served the families of that community, generation after generation, and its location on the mountain places it within a landscape that has accumulated loss in several distinct historical layers.