Killeennimhe, in the townland of Cordarragh in County Mayo, carries within it the Irish word "cillín", a term for a small, unconsecrated burial ground, most often used for unbaptised infants, those who died by suicide, or others excluded by the Church from burial in consecrated soil. These quiet, often unmarked sites are scattered across the Irish landscape, rarely signposted, and frequently overlooked even by those who live nearby. That this one retains a recorded place-name at all suggests it was once known and acknowledged by the local community, even if that knowledge has not been widely documented.

Cillíns occupy a particular place in Irish social and religious history. From the medieval period onward, and well into the twentieth century, Catholic canon law denied full burial rites to certain categories of the dead. Families, unable to inter their children in the parish graveyard, would instead carry them at night to liminal places, field boundaries, ancient earthworks, or small enclosures like this one, and bury them quietly and without ceremony. The grief was real, but the ritual was unofficial, and so the sites themselves were kept in memory through local tradition rather than through any formal record. Cordarragh lies in a part of Mayo where such oral traditions ran deep, and where the physical traces of earlier land use, both prehistoric and early Christian, remain embedded in the farming landscape.