Children's burial ground, Corrabaun, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Corrabaun, Co. Galway

There is a burial ground at Corrabaun, in north County Galway, that exists now only on paper.

The third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1948, marks the site with the abbreviation CBG, indicating a children's burial ground, on the northern side of a road through what was then grassland. Today, the entire area has been quarried away, and nothing visible remains at ground level.

Children's burial grounds of this kind are known in Irish as cillíní, and they are found across the country in considerable numbers. They were used, typically from the medieval period through to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for the interment of unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic doctrine from burial in consecrated ground. Suicides, shipwreck victims, and others considered outside the boundaries of the Church were sometimes buried in them too. The sites were usually informal, often located at townland boundaries, beside old earthworks, or near ancient monuments, and they were maintained through local custom rather than any official arrangement. The one at Corrabaun left no structural trace even before quarrying began; like many cillíní, it would have been marked by little more than small stones or a slight rise in the ground.

What makes the Corrabaun site particularly stark is the completeness of its erasure. The 1948 map captured it just in time, and the record of that cartographic notation is now the only evidence that this ground ever held the dead.

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