These grounds, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered by the Catholic Church to be ineligible for burial in consecrated ground. Stillborn children, and sometimes those who died before a priest could be reached, were laid to rest in marginal spaces: old ring-forts, shorelines, boundary ditches, and the ruins of early medieval ecclesiastical sites. The Coolsuppeen ground belongs to this tradition, a landscape of grief that existed largely outside official record and parish documentation.

Cillíní as a practice reflect the long shadow cast by the doctrine of limbo, the theological concept holding that unbaptised souls could not enter heaven. Though limbo was never formally defined as dogma, it shaped pastoral practice in Ireland for centuries, and the consequence for bereaved families was a burial outside the community's shared sacred space. The locations chosen were rarely random: many cillíní cluster around pre-Norman ecclesiastical remains or places already understood as liminal, neither fully secular nor fully sanctified. In this sense, the choice of ground was its own form of care. The Coolsuppeen site in Clare adds to a county that already holds a notable concentration of such monuments, reflecting both the density of early settlement in the region and the thoroughness with which these informal burial traditions persisted into the modern period.