These grounds, known in Irish as cillíní (singular cillín), were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic practice. The exclusion was rooted in the doctrine that baptism was necessary for salvation, and so unbaptised children occupied an awkward, sorrowful position in the eyes of the institutional Church. Families buried them instead in marginal places: old ringforts, boundary ditches, shorelines, and pre-Christian enclosures. The cillín at Kilrateera belongs to this wider, largely unrecorded landscape of quiet grief.

Cillíní as a practice persisted in Ireland from at least the early medieval period through to the mid-twentieth century, though the custom varied by region and community. Some sites accumulated use over many generations, their locations passed down through local knowledge rather than formal record. The graves themselves were rarely marked with headstones, and the grounds were not maintained in the way of churchyards. In Clare, as elsewhere in the west of Ireland, the density of such sites reflects both the strength of local tradition and the persistence of a theology that placed enormous weight on the sacramental moment of baptism. The Kilrateera site is recorded as a monument, which places it within the broader effort to document and protect these places before they are lost entirely to land change or simple forgetting.