Children's burial ground, Ballyfeerode, Co. Limerick

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Ballyfeerode, Co. Limerick

In a field of improved pasture in County Limerick, there is a patch of ground that the Ordnance Survey once took care to label but that the landscape has otherwise quietly swallowed.

No stones mark it out to the casual eye, no wall encloses it, and yet aerial imagery taken between 2011 and 2013 still reveals a faint hollow and the ghost of a boundary, the last visible signs of a children's burial ground that was already recorded as disused by the time the Cassini edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced.

This is a cillin, a type of informal burial ground once widely used across Ireland for unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic Church doctrine from consecrated ground. Such sites, typically small and set apart from parish cemeteries, were often located at field margins, old ringfort interiors, or townland boundaries. This one sits roughly 575 metres west of the Ahnalushnia Stream, the watercourse that marks the boundary between the townlands of Ballyfeerode and Kilgarriff. It does not appear on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1840, suggesting it was either not yet in use or not considered worth recording at that time. By 1897, however, the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map shows it clearly, annotated as "Infants' Burial Gd." and mapped as a sub-rectangular enclosure measuring approximately 17 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 13 metres on its northwest to southeast axis. That it had already passed out of active use by the later Cassini edition reflects a broader pattern across the country, as the twentieth century saw such sites gradually fall from use and, in many cases, from memory.

For anyone trying to locate the site today, the most practical tool is Google Earth, which shows the faint outline well enough to orient yourself in the field. The ground itself offers little to see at close range; the enclosure has been levelled, and the slight depression visible from above is easy to miss underfoot. The surrounding land is working farmland, so access would require landowner permission. The site was compiled and uploaded to record by Martin Fitzpatrick in November 2021, part of a broader effort to document such quietly erased places before the landscape absorbs them entirely.

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