The one at Burris in County Mayo belongs to this quiet and melancholy tradition. Because the Catholic Church long denied Christian burial to infants who died before baptism, families were left to find other places, and they turned to liminal spots in the landscape: old ruins, boundaries, shorelines, and ancient earthworks. These grounds were neither blessed nor cursed in any formal sense, simply set apart, existing in a kind of theological margin.

The practice of burying children in such places persisted in Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and the locations chosen were rarely random. Many cillíní occupy sites with much earlier histories, prehistoric earthworks or the ruins of early Christian enclosures, as though the ground itself carried a kind of sanctity that pre-dated parish boundaries. Burris, as a place name, likely derives from the Irish word for a fortified enclosure or settlement, which hints at the age of the landscape in which this burial ground sits. The grief bound up in these places was largely private, the burials unrecorded and the markers, when they existed at all, modest stones or nothing more than memory.