Burial Ground for Children, Cappafeean, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
On a north-south ridge in Cappafeean, County Clare, there is a circular patch of grass enclosed by a kerb of twenty-three stones.
No grave-markers survive. Nothing announces what this place once was, or who was laid to rest here. That absence is, in its own way, the whole story.
This is a cillín, a type of informal burial ground once used across Ireland for those who, under Catholic ecclesiastical practice, could not be interred in consecrated ground. Unbaptised infants were the most common occupants, though suicides, strangers, and others excluded from the parish churchyard were sometimes buried in these places too. The site at Cappafeean is a roughly circular, grass-covered enclosure measuring around twenty metres across its longer axis, defined by a kerb of twenty-three stones ranging from modest slabs to uprights nearly a metre in height. Traces of a perimeter boundary survive in places, suggesting the space was once more clearly delineated than it now appears. The site has suffered damage over time, and whatever grave-markers may once have stood here are gone.