Children's burial ground, Flean More, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
A rectangular patch of undulating pasture in County Limerick holds a quietly sorrowful kind of archaeology.
The ground here is uneven and stony, choked with tall grass and brambles, and its boundaries are marked not by walls but by a scarped edge, a low, cut embankment rising to a maximum of 0.7 metres, with rounded corners at the south-east and south-west. Midway along the southern scarp, two small recumbent slabs lie flat, each roughly the size of a large hardback book. This is a cillín, a children's burial ground of the kind once used across Ireland for infants who died before baptism and were therefore excluded from consecrated ground by Catholic canon law. Such places occupy a liminal space in the Irish landscape, neither fully sacred nor forgotten, carrying a particular weight of private grief.
The site at Flean More measures approximately 19 metres north to south and 28.7 metres east to west. Just north of centre, a hollow area lined irregularly with low upright slabs contains a concentration of loose stones at its northern end, and at the north-east corner stands an upright stone with a pointed top. A second, smaller setting of low slabs to the west of this roughly defines another rectangular area of about one metre by 0.6 metres. The historian Begley, writing in 1906, suggested the site may correspond to a place then called Dromagarrum, where unbaptised children were buried. He also connected it to a reference in Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of 1837, in which Lewis noted the remains of a very ancient church at Flean. If the identification holds, the burial ground may once have been associated with that ecclesiastical site, a relationship common to many cillíní, which were frequently established at the edges of early Christian enclosures or ruined church grounds.
The site sits in ordinary farmland, and access would require permission from the landowner. The interior is overgrown, so stout footwear is advisable, and the low scarped edge is easier to read from a slight distance than from within the enclosure itself. The small upright slabs are modest and easy to overlook at first glance; the pointed stone at the north-east corner is the most legible marker once you are inside. There is no formal signage or maintained path.