These grounds, known in Irish tradition as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants, and sometimes other individuals considered to exist outside the boundaries of formal Catholic burial, including stillborn children, women who died in childbirth, and occasionally strangers or those who died by suicide. Because the Church denied them consecrated ground, families buried these children in liminal places, field boundaries, the margins of ancient ringforts, or sites with older, pre-Christian associations. The grief was real; the burial was simply made to happen elsewhere.

The precise history of the Spaightspark site, its period of use, the families connected to it, and any physical features that survive on the ground, are not currently documented in publicly available records. What can be said is that cillíní as a practice persisted in Ireland from at least the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, and that Clare, with its dense landscape of early Christian and prehistoric remains, has a significant number of such sites. Many were located near old ecclesiastical enclosures or in ground that local memory regarded as hallowed in some older sense, even if the Church did not recognise it as such.