Children's burial ground, Gorteenlahard, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
At Gorteenlahard in County Galway, there is a place that no longer shows any sign of itself.
The ground has been levelled, the earthwork flattened, and the single marker once associated with it, described in local tradition as a stone bearing a cross, is gone. What remains is only the memory of what stood here: a children's burial ground, a cillín, of the kind once found quietly tucked into marginal or liminal spots across Ireland.
Cillíní were informal burial places used for unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground under Catholic practice. They occupied old earthworks, field boundaries, and ancient enclosures, places already set apart from ordinary land. At Gorteenlahard, the site sat within a pre-existing earthwork, lending it the layered quality typical of such places, one era of significance folded inside another. The crossed stone that local tradition recorded there suggests at least some gesture toward marking the ground, however modest. At some point in the recent past, the monument was levelled, and no visible surface trace now survives.