Mound, Coonmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
At the foot of a high natural scarp in County Tipperary, wedged between a cliff-edge and the Clasher River, there is a moss-covered enclosure that was once recorded as a children's burial ground, and yet shows no grave-markers whatsoever.
The site sits on level ground in this narrow margin of landscape, defined by a denuded wall of earth and stone, irregular and roughly circular in shape, with a heavy tangle of scrub filling its north-western quadrant. The feature that lends the place its name, a low linear mound in the south-western quadrant, turns out on closer inspection to be rather modest: just over six metres long, little more than a metre wide, and barely forty centimetres high.
The burial-ground identification dates to 1910, when H. S. Crawford recorded the site as a disused cill, or keel, the Irish term for an early medieval church enclosure that in later centuries was frequently repurposed as a burial place for unbaptised infants. These cillíní, as they are more commonly known, occupy a particular place in Irish social and religious history; because unbaptised children were denied consecrated ground under Catholic doctrine, families buried them instead in liminal spots, old enclosures, field boundaries, and shorelines, places that existed at the edges of ordinary life. The association here is plausible given the enclosure's form. What complicates it is the complete absence of any grave-markers, which leaves the identification uncertain. The low mound itself, running roughly north-west to south-east through the enclosure, has been assessed as a section of an old field boundary rather than anything of prehistoric or megalithic significance.