Children's Burial Ground, Lisdeligny, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s Burial Ground, Lisdeligny, Co. Galway

There is a small rise in a grassland field at Lisdeligny, in County Galway, that most people would walk past without a second glance.

A patch of nettles along a field boundary is the only surface sign that anything lies beneath or once stood here. This is a children's burial ground, a type of site known in Irish as a cillín, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, often quietly and without formal record, in the margins of the landscape.

The site was recorded on the 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an unenclosed, roughly subrectangular area running alongside a north-northeast to south-southwest field boundary. Cillíní were typically located at liminal places, old earthworks, boundaries, or slightly elevated ground, and Lisdeligny fits that pattern: the natural rise of the land itself marks the spot where the ground was once used. According to local information, the site was cleared around 1964, removing whatever surface traces had survived to that point. What remains is the topography, the nettles suggesting soil disturbance on the western side of the boundary, and the map evidence that something was once deliberately distinguished here.

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