These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for centuries across Ireland to inter infants who died before baptism, as Catholic doctrine of the time held that such children could not be buried in a parish churchyard. They were typically located at the margins of the landscape, in old enclosures, on the edges of townlands, or near ancient earthworks, places that carried their own ambiguous sanctity.

The burial ground at Timadooaun lies within a pre-existing enclosure, a feature that points to the long habit of attaching new significance to older, already-bounded spaces. The enclosure here predates the use of the ground as a cillín, though the precise relationship between the two is not recorded. What can be seen today amounts to very little: a few small set stones visible just inside the western bank of the enclosure. These stones, modest and easy to overlook, are the only surface trace of what the ground once held and once meant to local families.