Children's burial ground, Cloonaghgarve, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cloonaghgarve, Co. Galway

At Cloonaghgarve in County Galway, a ringfort contains something that was once far more than a defensive enclosure.

Tucked within its earthen banks is what remains of a children's burial ground, a type of site known in Irish as a cillín, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, often quietly, on the margins of settled life. The ringfort itself, a roughly circular enclosure of raised earthworks typical of early medieval farming settlements, was repurposed in the way these sites often were, their age and enclosing shape lending a sense of separated, bounded space that communities found fitting for burials outside the churchyard.

What survives today is sparse. A number of grave-markers remain, but they have been displaced, scattered across a clearance mound in the western sector of the ringfort. The mound suggests that at some point the ground was worked or tidied, and the markers caught up in that process rather than left in their original positions. There is no longer any visible sense of where individual burials may have lain. The site is recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, Volume II, covering North Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999, which provides the only detailed account of what can be observed there.

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