Children's burial ground, Ballycuddy Beg, Co. Tipperary

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Ballycuddy Beg, Co. Tipperary

At Ballycuddy Beg in County Tipperary, there is a burial ground that leaves no trace above ground, and whose precise location has been lost to time.

What is known is that children were once interred here, in the manner common across rural Ireland for many centuries, and that the spot was marked not by stone or wall but by a tree regarded as holy.

The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840, compiled during the great mapping project that systematically documented Irish placenames and local lore, recorded this site as lying beneath a holy tree. Such trees, typically hawthorns or ash, were understood to stand at the boundary between the everyday world and something older, and were often chosen to mark places of quiet significance. The burial ground itself belongs to a tradition known in Irish as a cillín, a practice of interring unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground in liminal locations, field corners, riverbanks, and similarly marginal spots. By the time Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien compiled the Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary in 2002, no visible remains could be identified at the site. The tree is gone, or at least unidentifiable, and with it the only marker that once made this ground legible to those who passed it.

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