These sites are known in Irish tradition as cillíní, small unconsecrated plots set apart from the main churchyard, where unbaptised infants, and sometimes others excluded from formal Catholic burial, were laid in the ground without ceremony or official record. They were not forgotten by the communities who used them, but they were kept quiet, occupying a space between the acknowledged and the unspoken.

The practice of burying unbaptised children in separate, marginal ground reflects the long reach of a particular theological position, namely that infants who died before baptism could not be received into consecrated earth. In rural Ireland this translated into burials at liminal locations, old ring-fort banks, cliff edges, the boundaries of townlands, and sometimes ancient ecclesiastical enclosures whose pre-Christian associations made them feel, if not exactly sacred, then at least apart from the ordinary world. Mayo, a county with a dense and layered archaeological landscape, has many such sites, most of them modest in appearance, marked by nothing more than small stones or slight depressions in the ground. The one at Troiste belongs to this wider pattern, a quietly significant place in a county where such grounds are still being recorded and studied.

Because detailed records for this particular site have not yet been made publicly available, much about Troiste's cillín remains to be documented and understood. What is known is its category and its location, which is itself enough to suggest the kind of careful, unannounced presence these places tend to have in the countryside.