These small, unconsecrated plots were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, and occasionally others considered ineligible for burial in consecrated ground, including stillborn children, travellers, and those who died by suicide. The practice reflects a particular tension in post-Reformation Irish Catholicism, where the unbaptised were thought to be barred from heaven and therefore from hallowed earth. Families turned instead to older, liminal places: ruined early medieval churches, ancient earthworks, field boundaries, or simply quiet corners of land that carried their own sense of remove from the everyday.

Cilliní are found in their hundreds across Ireland, and Clare has a notable concentration of them. They tend to occupy marginal ground, often at the edges of townlands or beside much older archaeological features, as if the people who used them were reaching back towards a pre-Christian sacred geography. Some are marked by small uninscribed stones; others have no surface trace at all and are known only through local memory passed from one generation to the next. The burial ground at Druminshin belongs to this largely silent landscape of grief, one that was for a long time considered too painful or too theologically complicated to discuss openly, and which has only relatively recently begun to receive the historical and archaeological attention it deserves.