The place is known locally as Aill na bPáistí, meaning the cliff or rocky place of the children, and it belongs to a category of burial ground that was once a quiet but widespread feature of the Irish landscape.

These sites, sometimes called cillíní or killeens, were used for the burial of unbaptised infants, and occasionally others considered to exist outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church. Because Church law historically denied such individuals burial in consecrated ground, communities established their own liminal spaces, often at boundaries, on old earthworks, or, as here, on coastal outcrops where land meets water. The name Aill na bPáistí is itself a piece of local memory, preserving the knowledge of the site's purpose in the Irish language long after the burials themselves ceased. The small set stones visible on the knoll are typical of how such graves were marked, modest and uncarved, nothing like the monuments of a formal graveyard. The site at Camas Íochtair sits on the inner shore of Cuan Chamais, a bay on the south Connemara coast, and was recorded by the cartographer and writer Tim Robinson, whose meticulous documentation of Connemara's landscape brought many such overlooked places to wider attention.