These small, informal burial sites were used for centuries to inter unbaptised infants, and sometimes others considered outside the boundaries of formal Catholic burial, including stillborn children, women who died in childbirth, and occasionally strangers or suicides. Because the Church denied consecrated ground to the unbaptised, families turned to older, liminal spaces: the margins of fields, ancient earthworks, sea cliffs, and forgotten enclosures. A cillín was not a place of shame so much as a place apart, carrying its own quiet gravity in the landscape.

Cilliní are among the more poignant and least-documented categories of archaeological monument in Ireland. Their use persisted from the early medieval period well into the twentieth century, sustained by a theology that has since been revised but which shaped the grief of countless families across the country. The Tullycreen site belongs to this widespread tradition, one that was practiced in virtually every county, yet rarely marked, rarely discussed, and rarely mapped until relatively recently. The precise history of this particular ground, including when it was first used and when burials ceased, is not currently documented in available sources.