Infant burial grounds, known in Irish as cilliní (singular cillín), occupy a peculiar and melancholy place in the landscape of rural Ireland. For centuries, unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborn children, were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice, and so communities quietly designated alternative sites for their interment. These were often liminal places, geographically and spiritually, located at townland boundaries, beside ringforts, along shorelines, or in other marginal spots that existed, in some sense, outside ordinary social and religious order. The practice was widespread across the country, yet individual sites were rarely marked, documented, or formally acknowledged during the centuries they were in use.

Cilliní were used from at least the early medieval period and continued, in some parts of Ireland, well into the twentieth century. The sites were maintained largely through local memory and community convention rather than through any official or ecclesiastical record. An Tsraith, a townland in Mayo, retains one such site, quietly present in a county where the practice was particularly common given the density of rural parishes and the persistence of traditional customs in the west of Ireland. The ground would have served local families during a period when the grief of infant loss carried an added weight, the child mourned privately, buried without ceremony, and rarely spoken of openly in later generations.