Known in Irish as a cillín (the diminutive of cill, meaning church or burial place), these small, often unmarked plots were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, who, under Catholic doctrine as it was interpreted at a popular level, could not be buried in consecrated ground. They tend to occupy liminal spaces, old ringfort banks, the margins of ancient ecclesiastical enclosures, or patches of rough ground at the edge of a townland, set apart in a way that reflects the theological and communal ambiguity surrounding the children buried in them.

The practice of using cillíní persisted in parts of rural Ireland well into the twentieth century, long after formal theological positions had softened. Parents who lost newborns, or who had stillborn children, were effectively left to arrange burial quietly and informally, without Church rites, in places already associated in local memory with the marginal or the pre-Christian. The site at Killinny belongs to this tradition, though the specific history of this particular ground, including when it was last used, how many burials it contains, and what physical traces remain visible, is not currently documented in the available record.