There are no inscriptions, no ornamental stonework, no enclosing wall. Just the stones, aligned north to south across a plot roughly fifteen metres by twelve, marking graves that were never meant to be forgotten but were never quite meant to be celebrated either.

This is a cillín, the Irish term for an informal burial ground used historically for those whom the Catholic Church denied consecrated ground, most often unbaptised infants. The theology behind the practice held that a child who died before baptism could not enter heaven, and so could not be buried in a parish churchyard. Instead, families brought their children to liminal places, threshold spots that sat outside the formal structures of both the Church and the settled landscape: old ringfort banks, boundary ditches, shorelines, and low hillocks like this one. The practice was widespread across Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and the grief attached to these places was often compounded by the expectation that mourning be kept private and brief. The unenclosed nature of the Gortnalone site is typical; cilliní were rarely given formal boundaries, which is part of why they can be so easy to walk past without understanding what you are seeing. The small set slabs here, each one marking a child, give the site a particular quietness that is hard to attribute simply to its remoteness.