Children's burial ground, Skeheenaranky, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At the edge of a small precipice above the Sheep River gorge in County Tipperary, a tight oval of rubble stone sits in waterlogged upland pasture, its walls barely visible beneath a covering of grass and moss.
It measures roughly six and a half metres across at its widest interior point, with walls about a metre and a half thick. The entrance, just wide enough for a person, faces the southeast. Inside, the ground is wet and heavily rushy, and some stones near the entrance have collapsed inward. According to local tradition, this is a children's burial ground.
Sites like this are known across Ireland as cillíní, informal burial grounds used for unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic church law, could not be interred in consecrated ground. They occupy a particular place in Irish social and religious history, the grief surrounding them often kept quiet, the locations remembered only in local memory. The enclosure at Skeheenaranky follows the small oval form common to such sites, its rubble stone wall separating a tiny consecrated-by-custom space from the surrounding rough pasture. The precipice edge and the steep drop to the river below give the location an unintentionally dramatic quality, though the site itself is modest and unassuming. No grave markers appear to survive, and nothing about the place announces its purpose to anyone who does not already know.