Children's burial ground, Townparks, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Townparks in County Galway, children were once buried in ground that has since disappeared entirely from the visible landscape.
No mound, no enclosure, no stone marks the spot today. What survives is only a name, caught briefly on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1932, where the site appears labelled but without any clear cartographic symbol to fix its precise location.
This was almost certainly a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants, and sometimes for others who were excluded from burial in hallowed ground under Catholic church law. Such places were typically tucked into the margins of the landscape, associated with ancient earthworks, field boundaries, or other liminal features. In this case, the burial ground is recorded in connection with a nearby earthwork, suggesting it occupied or adjoined a pre-existing raised or enclosed feature in the ground. By the time cartographers were mapping the area in the early twentieth century, the site was known well enough to be named, yet already indistinct enough that no clear marking could be made. Whatever earthwork once gave it shape or boundary had either been levelled by then or was too subtle to render with confidence on the map.
Nothing of the site is visible today. The land has absorbed it entirely, leaving no surface trace that a visitor could identify.