Children's Burial Ground, Keekill, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s Burial Ground, Keekill, Co. Galway

At Keekill in County Galway, an overgrown, irregular patch of ground sits within the eastern sector of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, its interior scattered with set stones and rectangular plots that quietly mark the graves of unbaptised children.

These are the characteristic contents of a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for infants who died before baptism and were therefore excluded, under older Catholic practice, from burial in consecrated ground. Such sites are extraordinarily common across Ireland, yet they remain among the least visited and least discussed of the country's early medieval and post-medieval remains.

The site measures roughly forty metres on its longer axis and twenty-seven and a half metres across, an irregular shape defined on three sides by a field wall that may itself overlie a much earlier boundary, and on the eastern side by the bank of the enclosure. The enclosure it occupies is an early ecclesiastical one, suggesting that the ground here has carried religious significance for well over a millennium, even if the burials within this particular corner of it belong to a more sorrowful, unofficial tradition. The randomly placed stones and the identifiable rectangular plots speak to generations of families who brought their children here quietly, outside the formal structures of the Church, and marked the graves in whatever way they could.

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