These sites, known in Irish as cilliní (singular: cillín), were informal burial grounds used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic doctrine, could not be buried in consecrated ground. They occupy a particular and melancholy corner of Irish social history, neither fully acknowledged nor entirely forgotten, typically located near old boundaries, the ruins of early churches, or simply in ground that local tradition had long set apart.

Cilliní were not official places of burial in any ecclesiastical sense. Because unbaptised children were considered to exist in a theological grey area, excluded from the sacraments and therefore from churchyard burial, families would inter them in these liminal spaces, often at night and without ceremony, out of necessity rather than indifference. The practice was widespread from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, and the sites themselves vary considerably: some are clearly marked with small stones or hollows in the ground, others have almost no surface trace at all. Clare, with its dense concentration of early ecclesiastical remains and its strong traditions of local memory, has a number of such sites recorded across its townlands. The one at Derryshaan is among them, though the details of its exact character, extent, and any associated features remain to be fully documented.