Children's burial ground, Cregg, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Cregg, Co. Galway

A small cluster of stones in the south-eastern corner of an old earthwork enclosure is all that marks this children's burial ground at Cregg in County Galway.

Known as Lisín na bPáistí, the name translates roughly as "the little fort of the children", and it belongs to a category of burial place that was once quietly common across rural Ireland. These sites, sometimes called cillíní, were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others who, under Catholic practice, could not be buried in consecrated ground. The choice of a ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period, was not accidental. Such places were already understood as set apart from ordinary land, associated in folk memory with the older world, and so they became, in a practical and perhaps spiritual sense, appropriate ground for those excluded from the parish cemetery.

The ringfort within which this burial ground sits is a pre-existing structure, its origins lying well before the burials that came to occupy part of its interior. Ringforts, built roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries, functioned primarily as enclosed farmsteads, their raised banks offering protection for a family and their livestock. That later communities chose to bury unbaptised children within them speaks to the layered way in which such landscapes were understood and reused across the centuries. The burial ground itself is recorded as Lisín na bPáistí, and the visible remains consist of a number of small set stones in the south-eastern quadrant of the enclosure, modest markers that nonetheless preserve the memory of the site and the lives it quietly holds.

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