These sites are known in Irish as cillíní, singular cillín, and they served a function that reflects one of the more painful intersections of Catholic doctrine and rural Irish life. Unbaptised children, who were considered by the Church to be excluded from consecrated ground, were buried instead in marginal spaces: old ringforts, boundary ditches, the edges of bogs, and places just like this one in Mayo. The practice continued in some areas well into the twentieth century.

Cillíní are found in their thousands across Ireland, often unmarked or marked only by small uninscribed stones. They tend to occupy liminal ground, places that were already set apart from ordinary use, which is partly why so many are located within or beside early medieval enclosures or other ancient earthworks. The association was not accidental. Pre-Christian or early Christian sites carried a residual sanctity that made them feel appropriate for burial, even if the Church would not officially sanction it. In a landscape where the dead needed to be placed somewhere, communities developed their own quiet geography of grief. The Cunnagher site takes its place within that broader pattern, a feature of the Mayo countryside that says something specific about how families here navigated loss under difficult circumstances.