Children's burial ground, Curragh More, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Curragh More, Co. Galway

Within the interior of an ancient earthwork at Curragh More in County Galway, a cluster of small graves occupies a patch of ground that was never meant to be a formal cemetery.

The graves are marked not by headstones but by set stones placed haphazardly across an irregular, unenclosed area roughly thirteen and a half metres north to south and thirteen metres east to west. There are no inscriptions, no kerbing, no orderly rows. Just stones, and what lies beneath them.

The site sits in the south-eastern quadrant of a rath, the kind of circular earthen enclosure that was once a farmstead or defended homestead, common across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards. Raths were the homes of farming families, their banks and ditches marking the boundary between the domestic and the outside world. That this particular rath came to hold a children's burial ground is not, historically speaking, unusual. Across Ireland, places known as cillíní were used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others who were excluded, by the rules of the Church, from consecrated ground. These sites were often located at liminal places already charged with some older significance, and ancient earthworks were frequently chosen. The children buried here left no names and no dates. What remains is the arrangement of stones, the irregular outline of the ground they occupy, and the quiet fact of their presence inside a structure that had already been old for centuries before any of them were born.

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