These sites, known in Irish as cilліní (the singular is cillín), were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered, under Catholic doctrine, ineligible for consecrated ground. They occupy a peculiar position in Irish social and religious history, neither fully sacred nor entirely secular, and they tend to sit at the margins, physically and symbolically, of the communities that used them.

The practice of burying unbaptised children in separate, unconsecrated ground was shaped by the theological concept of limbo, the idea that souls who had not received baptism could not enter heaven. For rural Irish families, this created a painful reality: an infant who died before baptism, or shortly after birth, could not be laid to rest in the parish cemetery alongside other family members. Instead, parents carried their children to places like this one at Kilcooney, often at night and without ceremony, to bury them in ground that was old, liminal, and quietly understood by the community. Many cilліní are located near ruined early medieval churches, on townland boundaries, or at the edges of bogs and fields. The grief attached to them was largely unspoken, and for much of the twentieth century these sites were actively forgotten rather than remembered.

The Kilcooney site in Clare is one of many such monuments recorded across the country, each carrying its own local history that remains, in many cases, only partially documented.