These are cillíní, the informal graveyards that once received the unbaptised, children who died before the church could claim them in its rites. For centuries across Ireland, canon law held that the unbaptised could not be interred in consecrated ground, and so communities found their own quiet solutions: marginal land at the edges of fields, the banks of rivers, the rims of ancient ringforts, or simply a corner of a townland that nobody would disturb. Cappanapeasta has one such place, recorded and named, its purpose plain in its title even if its precise stones and boundaries are harder to trace.

Cillíní, sometimes called killeens, represent one of the more quietly affecting presences in the Irish landscape. They were rarely marked with formal headstones, and many survive now as slight rises in the ground, clusters of small unmarked stones, or simply as a local memory carried in a placename. The practice of burying unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborn children, in these separate grounds continued in parts of Ireland well into the twentieth century, driven by a combination of ecclesiastical rule and the social pressure that surrounded it. Clare, with its dense scatter of ancient sites and its strong tradition of localised sacred geography, has a number of such sites, each one a record of grief managed at the margins of official religion.