Burial Ground for Children, Curragh, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground for Children, Curragh, Co. Clare

On a gently sloping hillside in County Clare, a small patch of ground holds the unmarked graves of unbaptised infants, separated in death as they were in doctrine from those buried in consecrated soil.

These places, known in Irish tradition as cillíní (singular: cillín), were where families quietly laid children who had died before receiving the sacrament of baptism, since Catholic teaching long excluded such infants from official burial in churchyards. The site at Curragh sits on a south-east-facing slope overlooking a stream valley, its roughly subrectangular shape measuring around 17 metres by 23 metres, bordered not by walls but by irregular, poorly defined edges that seem to dissolve into the surrounding pasture.

The ground was recorded as a burial place for children as far back as the 1842 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which named it plainly as 'Burial Gd. for Children'. Later Ordnance Survey editions, including the 25-inch map and the 1920 revision of the six-inch, continued to mark it under the name 'Children's Burial Ground', suggesting it remained known and recognised across generations. Within the enclosure, low upright stone markers are scattered across the interior, many appearing to face east, a orientation that carries Christian symbolic weight even in a space excluded from formal religious rites. At the western end, a distinct cluster of these markers is arranged in two parallel linear sequences, a deliberate pattern that sets this corner apart from the otherwise random distribution elsewhere. Mature whitethorn trees, themselves long associated in Irish folk belief with liminal and sacred spaces, grow throughout the site, along with dense vegetation that has colonised much of the ground. Local knowledge confirms the site's function as a resting place for unbaptised babies, and though the surrounding field was reclaimed for agricultural use in relatively recent times, the burial ground itself has been left undisturbed.

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