Infants Burial Ground., Eastwell, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
Inside a ringfort on the edge of Eastwell in north County Galway, there is a patch of ground where unbaptised infants were once quietly laid to rest.
The site is what is known in Irish tradition as a cillín, sometimes rendered as CBG or children's burial ground, a category of place found across the country wherever families, barred by Catholic practice from burying unchristened children in consecrated ground, chose instead a liminal or ancient landscape feature. That this particular cillín sits within a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure typical of early medieval Irish farmsteads, gives it a layered strangeness: a pre-Christian monument repurposed, generation after generation, for a grief that official religion left without ceremony or sanctioned space.
The ground is unenclosed and roughly rectangular, measuring just under 24 metres north to south and a little over 8 metres east to west. Within that modest footprint, a number of moss-covered set stones mark individual graves, each oriented east to west in keeping with Christian burial tradition, even as the children interred here were denied the rites that usually went with it. The site is recorded as being in fair condition, and it is still known locally by the term cillín, which suggests the memory attached to it has not entirely faded. No dates are given for when burials here began or ended, and none of the individual graves carry names.