The one at Ballycar in County Clare belongs to a tradition known in Irish as cillíní, small unconsecrated plots where infants who died before baptism were laid to rest. Because Catholic doctrine once held that unbaptised children could not enter heaven, they were excluded from consecrated ground, and so communities found their own places for them: field margins, ancient ringforts, coastal dunes, and liminal spots at the edges of parishes. These sites were used for centuries, in many cases well into the twentieth century, and they tend to be recognisable today by low, irregular mounding, small uninscribed stones, and a particular stillness that sets them apart from their surroundings.

The Ballycar site sits within a county that contains numerous such grounds, Clare's landscape having retained much of this older funerary geography. The cillín tradition reflects a community response to institutional exclusion, families maintaining their own quiet rites for children the Church would not formally receive. Some sites of this type are associated with earlier ecclesiastical enclosures or pre-Christian burial places, suggesting that the ground chosen was already understood to carry some significance before it was put to this use. Without more detailed records presently available for this particular site, its precise origins and the period during which it was actively used remain unclear.