They are unshaped and carry no inscription. They may easily be missed, obscured as they are by dense overgrowth, and no one has been able to count them or trace any pattern in how they lie. What they mark, however, is quietly devastating: this is a cillín, a burial place for unbaptised infants.

For centuries in Ireland, Catholic doctrine held that babies who died before baptism could not be buried in consecrated ground. Families turned instead to liminal places, sites that existed somehow outside ordinary religious jurisdiction: old earthworks, boundary ditches, shorelines, and ancient enclosures. A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built predominantly during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead or settlement. By the time these infant burials were taking place, such structures were already ancient, atmospheric, and set apart from everyday use, which may partly explain why they were chosen. The interior of this particular rath became one of those quiet repositories, receiving the bodies of children whose deaths placed their families in an impossible position between grief and official prohibition.

The stones at Roos give almost nothing away. They are low, unworked, and offer no names or dates. The vegetation around them makes it difficult even to establish how many there are. That resistance to easy reading feels appropriate, perhaps, for a place that came into use precisely because these children could not be openly mourned through the usual channels.