Grave yard, Gleann Chalraí Íochtarach, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Grave yard, Gleann Chalraí Íochtarach, Co. Mayo

On the lower slopes of a steep mountain hillside in County Mayo, there is a small, roughly oval patch of raised ground that has served two quite different purposes across nearly a century of mapping.

The Ordnance Survey recorded it simply as a "Grave Yard" on its 1838 six-inch map; by the 1921 edition, the same ground had been renamed "Children's Burial Ground". That shift in name carries considerable weight. Children's burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for infants who died unbaptised and were therefore, under older Catholic practice, excluded from consecrated ground. These were quiet, often liminal places, tucked against field boundaries, river banks, or ancient earthworks, and they appear throughout the Irish landscape with a particular kind of absence at their centre.

The enclosure itself is a subcircular area measuring roughly twelve metres by eleven, bounded by a low grass-covered bank of earth and stone. A stream runs along its northern half, giving the site a natural boundary on that side. Inside, the graves are marked not with inscribed headstones but with small cairns of loose stone and a scattering of upright slabs, none of them bearing any text or carving. The largest of the standing markers, set just inside the bank on the south-eastern side, reaches only 0.8 metres in height. Writing in 1913 to 1914, a commentator named Neary proposed that a church may once have stood here, though no physical evidence has emerged to support that suggestion. To the east, Benmore Mountain provides an abrupt and dramatic backdrop to what is otherwise an understated and easily overlooked site.

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