These places, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used for the burial of unbaptised infants, and sometimes suicides, stillborn children, or others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic ecclesiastical rules. They occupy a particular kind of marginal space, literally and symbolically, often sited at old boundaries, on the edges of fields, beside water, or within the remains of earlier earthworks. Their use persisted in rural Ireland from at least the medieval period well into the twentieth century.

The cillín tradition reflects a theological reality that shaped grief for many Irish families across centuries. Because the Church held that baptism was required for admission to heaven, unbaptised children could not be buried in the parish churchyard. Families instead carried their infants to these informal, unconsecrated plots, usually at night and without ceremony, interring them in ground that sat outside the formal boundaries of Church authority but was nonetheless considered, by local tradition, to carry its own quiet sanctity. Many cillíní are associated with pre-Christian or early Christian sites, and the choice of ground was rarely arbitrary. The Askillaun site sits within this wider tradition, in a part of Mayo where such burial grounds are not uncommon along the coast and islands of Clew Bay and the Corraun Peninsula.

Because detailed records for this particular site have not yet been made widely available, the specific history of the Askillaun cillín, its extent, condition, and any associated features, remains to be fully documented in the public domain. What can be said is that its existence, even as a name on a map, gestures toward lives and losses that went largely unrecorded in any official register.