Children's burial ground, Caherminnaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
Inside the ruins of an ancient stone ringfort in County Clare, a small patch of ground holds rows of modest stones, each no taller than a hand's width, marking the graves of unbaptised children.
This is a cillín, the Irish tradition of burying infants and young children outside consecrated ground, a practice rooted in the long and troubled intersection of Catholic doctrine and rural grief. What makes Caherminnaun quietly arresting is not just the burial ground itself but its layered setting: the graves occupy the south-western interior of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure, on a site that Ordnance Survey mapmakers in 1842 still recorded as the location of Kilcameen Church.
By the time of the 1920 Ordnance Survey edition, the church had receded further into memory, represented only by a broken-line symbol indicating an unenclosed graveyard within the cashel's walls. The burial ground itself measures roughly eleven metres north to south and ten metres east to west. The grave markers, small flat stones averaging around forty centimetres in length and set in lines running north to south, are spaced up to two metres apart, though some lie side by side. To the south of the burial ground, a cairn, a loose mound of stones, overlies the cashel wall and may be connected to the burials, though its precise relationship is uncertain. Elsewhere within the cashel, in its south-eastern sector, there is a cist, a stone-lined prehistoric burial box, suggesting that this enclosed ground has drawn the dead to it across several distinct eras. Documentary evidence places burials here from at least 1897, when the antiquarian T. J. Westropp noted the site, and they continued into relatively recent decades.