The one at Teerleheen in County Clare is among them, a place set apart from the parish graveyard for a reason rooted in centuries of Catholic theological tradition. Unbaptised children, who were considered to have died outside the church, could not be buried in consecrated ground, and so communities quietly established these separate plots, sometimes in ancient or liminal locations, to receive them. The practice continued well into the twentieth century in parts of rural Ireland.

Cilliní occupy a particular place in Irish social and religious history. The grief associated with them was largely private, seldom marked by formal ceremony, and the plots themselves were rarely given headstones or any visible monument. Over time many were forgotten, their locations preserved only in local memory or in the occasional field name. Teerleheen, a townland in Clare, holds one such ground, its history at present only partially recoverable. What is known is the category of its use and its location, enough to place it within a wider landscape of quiet, unofficial mourning that once shaped how communities across Ireland dealt with infant death and ecclesiastical exclusion.