These sites, known in Irish as cillíní (the singular is cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered to exist outside the full rites of the Catholic Church. Because Church teaching held that baptism was necessary for salvation, unbaptised children could not be buried in consecrated ground. Families instead brought them to marginal places: old ringforts, early medieval enclosures, coastal edges, or simply unconsecrated corners of the landscape. The grief was real; the burial was quiet, often conducted at night, and rarely marked with any stone.

Kilcloher sits on the Kilkee peninsula, a stretch of Clare coastline where early Christian and pre-Norman settlement left a faint but legible pattern across the land. The name itself suggests an early ecclesiastical presence, and it is not unusual to find a cillín close to such a site, since the boundaries of an old church enclosure, even a ruined or forgotten one, carried a certain residual sanctity that made them acceptable for these informal burials. How long the ground at Kilcloher was used in this way, and by which surrounding communities, is not currently documented in any available public record.