No grave markers in any conventional sense, no inscriptions, no enclosure wall of consequence; just an arrangement of modest stones indicating that children had been buried here, apart from consecrated ground and apart from the adult dead. The stones are gone now, cleared away at some point in living memory, leaving a place that exists more in record and local recollection than in any visible form.

Burials of this kind, known in Irish as cillíní, were once widespread across the country. Unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborn children, were excluded by Catholic practice from burial in sanctified churchyards, and so communities set aside particular spots at the margins of the known world: the edges of townlands, the thresholds of old earthworks, places that already carried a sense of the liminal. A ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of enclosure, carried exactly that quality of ancientness and separateness. The Inchiquin site fits a pattern seen across Connacht and beyond, where the boundaries of such early structures were quietly repurposed for this sorrowful purpose. The site appears to correspond with a reference in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable nineteenth-century collection of local topographical and antiquarian observations, which noted a small spot at Inchiquin formerly used as a burial place for children.