These children, dying before they could receive the sacrament of baptism, were excluded by Catholic doctrine from consecrated ground, and so communities across Ireland quietly established separate spaces for them. These sites are known in Irish as cillíní, informal burial places that exist in their thousands across the country, tucked into field margins, ringforts, coastal dunes, and riverbanks, neither fully sacred nor simply abandoned.

The Rathmacan site carries a name that is itself a kind of document. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan recorded it as Kyle-na-geawrlach, an anglicisation of the Irish Cill na nGeárlach, which he translated as the Churchyard of the Children, noting that the word cill, though it literally means church, had come to function as the ordinary term for a burial ground. By the time Carrigan was writing, the site was already understood as being used only for the burial of unbaptised children, suggesting it had long since ceased to serve any broader funerary purpose. The 1900 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks it plainly as Infants' Burial Ground, a rare instance of such a place receiving any official cartographic acknowledgement at all.