These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), were informal burial grounds used for those who could not, under Catholic Church practice, be interred in consecrated ground. Unbaptised infants made up the majority of those buried in such places, though the category also included stillborn children, and sometimes adults who had died by suicide or who were otherwise excluded from the parish cemetery. The locations chosen were often liminal, in some sense already set apart: old ringfort banks, the edges of bogs, the ruins of pre-Norman churches, or simply field corners that carried some vague inherited sense of being neither fully ordinary nor fully sacred.