These small, often unmarked plots were used for centuries to inter infants who had died before baptism, and occasionally others considered to exist outside the formal rites of the Catholic Church. Because unbaptised children were held, under older Church doctrine, to be ineligible for consecrated ground, families turned instead to liminal spaces: old ringfort enclosures, the margins of fields, ancient earthworks, or simply quiet corners of the landscape that carried some vague sense of prior sanctity. The practice persisted in rural Ireland well into the twentieth century, and the sites remain numerous, if frequently unannounced.

Cillíní occupy an unusual place in Irish archaeology and social history alike. They were rarely documented formally, being by their nature outside official church record-keeping, and many survive only as local memory or as slight disturbances in the ground. The grief surrounding them was also, historically, a quiet and largely private grief; the burials were conducted quickly, without ceremony, often at night. That combination of informality and sorrow means that even identified sites like the one at Garryduff tend to carry very little documentary paper trail. The specific history of this particular ground, its age, its extent, and the circumstances of its use, has not yet been fully recorded in publicly available form.