These grounds, known in Irish as cillíní (singular: cillín), were informal burial places used for unbaptised infants and others considered, under older Catholic practice, ineligible for consecrated ground. They tend to occupy liminal spaces, field margins, ancient ringfort interiors, or spots beside running water, and their presence in a townland is often remembered in local tradition long after any visible markers have weathered away.

The use of cillíní was widespread in Ireland from the medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, shaped by theological doctrine holding that unbaptised children could not enter heaven and therefore could not be buried in parish churchyards. Families buried their infants privately, often at night and without ceremony, in places that carried some older sense of sanctity or simply lay close to home. The grief attached to these sites was largely unspoken for generations. In recent decades, cillíní have attracted growing attention from archaeologists and local historians, and many remain on the landscape as low, unmarked enclosures or scatter of small stones, easily overlooked by anyone who does not know what they are looking at.

The Drumshinnagh site is recorded as a monument, but detailed information about its precise character, dimensions, or current condition is not yet publicly available. Given how quietly these sites sit in the land, it is worth approaching any cillín with care, both practically and in terms of what it represents to the communities whose ancestors used it.